You know, my father ran the research division of a multinational corporation for many years.  He said the hardest part of the job was keeping top corporate management, which was accustomed to the steady flow of widgets, tuned in to the fact that research doesn't operate on a conveyor-belt schedule.  

You seem to have succumbed to the same thinking.  Forty years without resolving the conundra in several important theories is not significant  --  basic research does not operate on a smooth curve, but rather in weird, random stairsteps.  

I also wonder how much the drastic shift from university-sourced funding to corporate-sourced has affected basic research.  Corporations by their very nature do not want theoretical science, they want applied science  --  they want widgets, and they want more and better of what they're already doing.  Hardly any research is being done in the US that does not have direct corporate funding  --  and I worry about the impact of that change.