[planck01]

It's because everyone wants to be the new Einstein and his special and general relativity theory were mathematically beautiful. Those theories prophesied new phenomena that were actually found to exist and are real and measurable.

I don't think any subsequent new big theory like string theory accomplished that and Einstein-emulation seems a dead end. However theorist don't give up on the approach and quite a lot of them seem to argue that beauty without testability is good enough, while that is really really iffy.