To what extent are theory and bureaucracy an obstacle to scientific progress?

In the history of science and technology we have periods in which we have relatively rapid progress -- Classical Greece, seventeenth century Europe, the period 1850-1950 in Europe and America -- and we have other periods of relative stagnation, and even retrogression. Arguably, currently, we are in a period of the latter type. Life expectancy is going down, there is great confusion over important issues like climate science, and new energy sources like controlled nuclear fusion cannot be effectively developed. What's the problem, exactly? What's missing? What's holding things up? We know that in the high Middle Ages, there was considerable investment in post-secondary insitutions, but, in practical terms, rather little work of actual signficiance was done there. This is the time of the "mediaeval scholastics". The classic, perhaps apocryphal example of "research" at this time is "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?". Now, one of the reasons for this problem, was an obsession with a kind of "theory" in the European mediaeval world. A "theory" in the most literal sense -- Christianity, that is. It's no coincidence that the word for a scientific theory comes from the Greek word for "God". Rather than looking for facts, the scholastics simply speculated on theory. Now, supposedly, all that changed with Galileo Galilei, a true empiricist. But, Galileo got in trouble for being an empiricist. So, we had to get another "theorist" -- Isaac Newton -- to get the scientists "back in the box". Currently, we have an enormous academic industry based on speculations involving Einstein's theory of Relativity. This theory, after 120 years, has no practical applications whatsoever. GPS is done empirically, Relativity is not required, and is only vaguely consistent with parts of it. Every single NASA interplanetary probe should have shown time dilation effects varying from a few milliseconds to a few seconds, if Relativity was correct. None of them have. The Scientific Industry currently is a huge bureaucracy, and bureaucracies cost money. Thomas Edison knew this perhaps as well as anyone, and he had nothing but contempt for the "perfessers" and their ways. Edison was a pragmatist, he wanted money for practical purposes. Not so, by any means, the "scientific bureaucracies" and their abstract "theories". Is this the problem, perhaps?