This kinda reminds me of the guys who decided to industrialize digging up dinosaur fossils, in order to feed the dinosaur fossil collector market. They were amazed that paleontologists were so "inefficient" at finding and digging up dinosaur fossils.

But from paleontologists' perspective, they go out looking for dinosaur fossils when they have questions that digging up a fossil may answer. The metric they're focusing on isn't tons of fossil mined out of the ground, it's a developing understanding of extinct life.