It is a shame that you can hardly get support for this kind of work without citing a shibboleth like "dark matter".

It would be better to build the thing to see what surprises it reveals. A remarkably large fraction of Nobel prizes come from inventing a new measurement method and then discovering a previously unsuspected phenomenon. So, we appreciate such discoveries after the fact, but cannot seem to support the kind of work that tends to evoke them, except by accident.