[scarmig]

The Higgs boson also wasn't super risky an undertaking. It was expected, and the project was a multi-billion dollar affair that was likely to come up with something. A somewhat ungenerous view is that it was just glorified taxonomy.

When you think about the sums involved, we could have done a whole lot of smaller, riskier projects, which may or may not have panned out but had a great deal more potential. Which I guess is your point.

[neutronicus]

It's not like looking for the Higgs is the only thing people have done at the LHC. For instance, there's another big experiment going on investigating Quark-Gluon plasma, and the OPERA experiment was using LHC neutrinos.

The LHC is a big, expensive piece of infrastructure that groups have to share, but there are multiple groups.

[yen223]

Could the smaller projects have the expertise and resources to discover something like the Higgs-Boson?

Centralization of resources is not necessarily a bad thing.

[SoftwareMaven]

The more important question is could multiple smaller labs have come up with something more valuable (to science or society) than weighing the Higgs Boson (the discovery was expected, the weight was an unknown)?