The analogy between nuclear fission and quantum computing doesn’t really work. Fission was a relatively new physical phenomenon the Manhattan Project scientists were studying to turn it into a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that too had no precedent except in natural disasters. Quantum computing is a new technology that is supposed to make already effectively computable problems computable faster; it is ideally supposed to provide an increase in capacity, not capability. It should definitely be able to make tiny computations work before going for the bigger problems. That’s how all computing works, if it can’t solve simple problems, it’s never going to solve bigger ones. What you’re saying here essentially sounds like “there will be a magical event one day when quantum computing solves the biggest computing problems and we’ll all realize it works.”

I am not particularly invested either which way about the likelihood of quantum computing being a major breakthrough or not but this is seeming like yet one more area of computing research like crypto and LLMs which in recent years is increasingly being flooded by people on a hype train.

Given that 15 has already been factored using Shor's algorithm on a real quantum computer, I think we can.