[ecosystem]

The legit criticism with a legit recommended change is even better.

A time and technological gap always exists between theory and a plan for experimental confirmation. Some gaps are fairly short. String theory's gap is undoubtedly long, not for lack of resources.

This gap justifies tapering the allocation of attention and research resources (funding, students, etc), which got lopsided following the strong marketing campaign driven by Greene.

[setopt]

I tend to agree. Science funding is unfortunately a limited resource, and I would like to see different approaches explored in more detail, which unfortunately would imply less (but not zero) funding to string theory. Not zero, because we also don’t want the competence built up in string theory groups to die out completely, in case that remains our best lead.

To borrow a compsci analogy, we tried the depth-first search going in the string theory direction, maybe it’s time to switch to breadth-first for a while, to see if there are any viable and useful theories with less distance from the ones we have today. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a "theory of everything" either, we can initially settle for a "theory of more".