Great analysis. A lot of people think that science follows an inevitable and predetermined progression of truths - a "tech tree" determined by the cosmos - but that's clearly not the case, especially in the field of medicine.

Sometimes I rant about how computer vision's fatal flaw is that it is intellectually descended from Computer Science, and so the field looks for results conceptually similar to the great achievements of CS - fast algorithms, proofs of convergence, complexity bounds, fully general frameworks, etc. But what people should really be doing is studying images - heading out into the world and documenting the visual structures and patterns they observe.