I haven't been deeply plugged into Wolfram's breakthroughs since "A New Kind Of Science," but if memory serves I don't think he's discovered anything that offers insight in the physics world in the utility sense. By which I mean: progress in physics usually looks like finding a novel relationship between previously-thought-separate phenomena, an improvement on the mechanics of using an existing theory for predictive power, or a conceptual simplification of existing theory (i.e. a new theory that completely explains the known observable phenomena of the previous theory while shaking out Russell's teapots the previous theory held).

I don't think Wolfram's work in the physics space on the cellular automata model has met any of these criteria, so it's not surprising he's not getting mainstrean publication traction. His CA model isn't bringing us novel relationships (yet; I hold out hope here), it isn't making it easier to do what we already do, it hasn't yielded any predictions that existing theories don't also yield, and it's certainly not simpler than field theory and relationship formulae that don't assume a CA. Until there's a breakthrough in one of those three categories that can't be done easily with one of the traditional mechanisms, Wolfram's doing the scientific equivalent of translating lingua franca physics into Klingon; not really wasted effort in that it can be valuable to see something from more than one point of view, but not something that anyone's gonna pay him for or devote their precious column-inches to.