alt Hacker NewsIt depends on incentives. From what I can see in CS, a lot of young researchers are focused on short-term projects, disconnected from actual problems, and spend lots of effort to package the result to increase the chance of getting a paper in top conferences/journals, because they need this for their career. They will be forced to leave academia if they don't have enough results in time, from what I know. And even for established researchers, they have to do something similar, so their students can have enough results. And they need to try really hard to get funding, because institutions want researchers that can get lots of funding, so institutions can get money from that.
This is probably not the complete story, and probably a bit too pessimistic, but I think this is true...
In the end my take is that there is too much supply for research for the funding that exist. So lot of it focuses on wrong metrics and as thus is somewhat wasted. Or energy is spend on wrong things like chasing that funding.
I am not sure if we can afford more funding, so maybe amount of research should be cut in some way...