Publishing findings that amount to an admission that you and others spent a fortune studying a dead end is career suicide and guarantees your excommunication from the realm of study and polite society. If a popular theory is wrong, some unlucky martyr must first introduce incontrovertible proof and then humanity must wait for the entire generation of practitioners whose careers are built on it to die.
Quantum theory is so unlikely to be wrong that if large-scale fault tolerant quantum computers could not be built, the effort to try to build them will not be a dead end, but instead a revolution in physics.
