The guys in the middle aren't really advancing anything fundamental; they're moving incrementally. Anyone not making incremental moves (either forward or backward) is going to be called a kook by someone. Semmelweiss died in an insane asylum, for example, and Galileo was excommunicated not because the church thought he was wrong, but because the church thought the public couldn't handle it.
That's most of what is going on. However, although I have little interest in this type of science, this filling-in-of-holes is purposeful stuff. Sometimes it takes the guy that spends 30 years in a corner to find out that we can build robots that swim like frog sperm or something crazy like that. But yeah, it's numbing to see the number of articles that are basically: "we did this and saw that". Even so, I think ideology can drive science, but it can't inform it. That's the mistake that is made time and time again. Especially by those that have been rewarded when their ideology and science matched before.
My whole point is that when you make more than an incremental change you're going to run into trouble. You get a buy if what you're doing has no fundamental impact on the day-to-day lives of the proles - Newton, Hawking, Einstein, Mendeleev, etc - but if your research will actually change the behavior of society you're going to run into trouble. Likewise, if your research says that society has fundamentally changed (the ID guys, etc... although I'm loath to call them "researchers") you're in the same boat. Knowledge must be pursued for its own sake. Knowledge in support of ideology never ends well.