I agree in theory, but this has happened a lot. You’re arguing “the amount that should happen is non zero” which is uncontroversially true imo, but the hard question is “what fraction of the community’s effort should be spent on field building Vs directly doing things”—I think the answer is clearly not 100%, so the key Q becomes figuring out if it happens too much or too little right now. It sounds like you’re maybe not aware of a bunch of the field building work that has happened/is happening, I think you need to get a better sense on that in order to have an informed take of strategic errors or correct allocation of resources.
I agree in theory, but this has happened a lot. You’re arguing “the amount that should happen is non zero” which is uncontroversially true imo, but the hard question is “what fraction of the community’s effort should be spent on field building Vs directly doing things”—I think the answer is clearly not 100%, so the key Q becomes figuring out if it happens too much or too little right now. It sounds like you’re maybe not aware of a bunch of the field building work that has happened/is happening, I think you need to get a better sense on that in order to have an informed take of strategic errors or correct allocation of resources.