[isitmadeofglass]

> Is fair to say, for example, that we are about as clueless as our ancestors were with the bubonic plague?

“We” in the collective sense are not clueless about quantum mechanics at all. We have an extremely exact model, and pretty much every attempt At proving that it’s insufficient fails. The only “problem” with quantum mechanics is the same as the “problem” we had in Newtonian mechanics when we found that a tennis ball and a bowling ball falling from head height hit the ground at the same time. This was a problem because intuition would have the heavier object fall faster than the lighter. It wasn’t an actual problem with Newtonian mechanics though mind you. Our intuition was counter to reality, the problem was the intuition not the model of reality.

Naturally there were other actual problems with Newtonian mechanics, but none of that had to do with making it more intuitive. And the same is true of quantum mechanics. It doesn’t sound intuitive to most people, but that’s not problem, it just means your intuition about how systems should behave at these scales is wrong.