Thanks, this is in line with what I feel is going on. I woke up this morning to see a lot of comments on how my experience is proof that academia is broken. Instead, it just feels like everybody is being very cautious about our results.

We don't understand why our data doesn't line up with theory and this isn't some super well funded experiment like the ones at the LHC with like a million grad. students. This is just me in the lab alone with the hundreds of subtle ways the experiment could have gone wrong or needed a slight modification to the theory. It would take us a lot of effort to distinguish an experiment gone wrong from an interesting new development and that's not always worth it. Especially for such a niche area of research like I'm in.

Also, we did publish our data. We just did it in a conference proceeding with a lot of caveats attached to it instead of in a big journal article. That's the aspect that I was complaining about, but I do understand my advisor's decision.

I have to strongly disagree that science is broken here.