Separate comment to so it can be voted on separately: I don't know how you get this:

the fact that there hasn't been any fundamental breakthroughs in the last fifty years

I think you can only justify it by arbitrarily relabeling the progress of the last 50 years as "engineering" rather than science. This would be unfair, because the new technologies and capabilities did require new scientific advances to overcome the specific practical problems of getting them to work against everything Nature may throw at it.

Such advances may individually have less theoretical generality, but add them up, count the impact on our lives, and it's huge.

To avoid a long debate about this or that recent breakthrough, let me just borrow a point from (the usually angering) Steven Landsburg, who discusses a book written and set in 1991 -- less than 20 years ago -- with the following plot elements:

1) A door-to-door saleswoman pitches (hardcopy) encyclopedias to customers who eagerly seek easy access to vast quantities of information.

2) A man is eager to read an obscure novel he’s heard about, so he scours used book stores, hoping to find a copy. In the meantime, he’s not sure what the novel is about, and has no way to find out.

3) A comedian stores his collection of jokes on notecards, filling two rooms worth of file cabinets.

4) A collector of sound effects stores her collection on cassette tapes, and has no cost-effective way to create backups.

5) A man is unable to stay in close contact with his (adult) children, because long distance calling rates are prohibitively high.

Notice how archaic all of that looks to us?