That's the way I see it. For example , if you look at the vast leaps of improvement in the ~20 yrs. of 1965 to 1985, you see that .... every few years, something came along that rendered machines, that were a mere few years old, became dinosaurs. Some was ... yes ... a function of "faster and smaller". But then there comes a point of diminishing returns. The much bigger steps (as I recall it) was the DIFFERENCE IN METHOD.
It went from BFO, to TR, to VLF all-metal, to VLF disc. And then pulse came into popular usage (as I recall it) in the mid 1980s . And in each of those cases/steps, its an all new type of detection method. NOT a function of "faster and smaller". So too does our current plight seem to be, that simply improving on existing platforms has reached its point of diminishing returns (ie.: bumped into the laws of physics).
I'm not a scientist or engineer. But this is just the way I recall the evolution, and from what I gather reading from engineer types on this subject.
