The Higgs boson also wasn't super risky an undertaking. It was expected, and the project was a multi-billion dollar affair that was likely to come up with something. A somewhat ungenerous view is that it was just glorified taxonomy.

When you think about the sums involved, we could have done a whole lot of smaller, riskier projects, which may or may not have panned out but had a great deal more potential. Which I guess is your point.