[bhattid]

Hopefully I'm not interpreting, but I think latency's point is more epistemological than a comment on "how science is being done". For example, scientists will still use Newtonian mechanics (as opposed to relativistic mechanics) to model reality even though we know it's "wrong". Part of this is pragmatic (tensor arithmetic is computationally expensive), but part of it is also because there's a beauty in the model itself and how it approximates what we observe. Taken to a greater extreme, we can also make Newtonian-like models that don't model observed reality at all, but

Ultimately though, I would say you're right overall - most scientists (in my experience) do want to understand the world/reality, and want to do it accurately.