You never hired someone to find something useful to improve or fix? There a lot of people who are really good at that and really bad at just doing the things you tell them to do.
Having a plumber that can better solve problems during their work fixing a system is obviously a good thing. That simply isn't what is being discussed here, most mathematics research being raised are theoretical math that has no immediate practical use. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be worked on, but it isn't the same as solving a real world problem we have today.