Someone's got to have insights about how pure theory fits into the bigger picture.

I wasn't meaning to denigrate that sort of insight. (Though "how pure theory fits in" doesn't seem to me the same thing as "the relative usefulness of pure theory", which is what you said before, and I think what you're describing now sounds distinctly more valuable.) Just saying that it wasn't the kind of insight I would look for from studying the pure theory.

sometimes that's directly applicable

In this case, I wouldn't much expect it to be directly applicable. But I would expect it to be much easier to tell whether it is (and whether it's indirectly applicable) once one has a reasonable quantity of theory in hand.