The general counter to the pattern is noting that problems may be difficult, and may or may not have viable attacks right now, so we may be better off ignoring them after all.

This is valid where there are experts that can confidently estimate that there are no attacks. There are lots of expert physicists, so if steps towards teleportation were feasible, someone would've noticed. In case there are no experts to produce such confidence, correct course of action is to create them (perhaps from more general experts, by way of giving a research focus).

The rule "If it's an important problem, and we haven't tried to understand it, we should" holds in any case, it's just that in case of teleportation, we already did try to understand what we presently can, as a side effect of widespread knowledge of physics.