It's simpler than that, it is all about incentives. Science can happen even in the trenches of war, or by random employees in a patent office. Engineering needs resources and conerted efford. But when the incentives have nothing to do with science itself but rather with the struggle to keep all the PhD people employed, you end up with paper-mills and grant-harvester PIs. There s also a degeneration of the science culture due to so much self-promotion. Whatever happened to humility?

Engineering projects like Apollo or Manhattan succeded by taking the theory invented by a few madmen and making the entire effort to the end product. Instead we now have projects like the Human brain project (EU) and the Brain initiative that don't seem to have a defined goal, and no clear incentives. The HBP used to be about building an artificial brain, as ambitious as it sounds. Instead, petty politics and meddling led to the project becoming a project salad with very little to show. AFAIK the Brain initiative has not done better.

The article itself is another example of weak incentives. We don't need to invent another field called "progress studies" in order to make progress. That's only making the problem worse.