We tend to romanticise it, but in the end it's just another job. It shouldn't, because selling you doing science is not the same as doing science, but on the other hand social expectations are that you must have a job, so what kind of exemption were we hoping for exactly? Once you realise it's ordinary people looking for whatever ordinary people look for anywhere else everything falls into place. Some science gets done regardless, we're talking about professionals here.

But that's the system we built. Starting in college you're going to spend a decade and a half studying to be a world-class expert researching a topic of your own choosing.

And as soon as you become a professor you stop doing research and start begging for research funding so others can do what you did. And no one sees the problem with this so it continues.