Nice quote, and a very concise diagnosis of what ails much of science: lots of data jockeys, few true scientists. The output of scientific endeavor is not simply truth, but true theories. Or, more accurately, theories which accurately predict (i.e. are not falsified by) the broadest set of relevant observations. The real tragedy is that genuine theoretical advances are often ignored or overlooked because everyone is too busy collecting more data to notice.
The real tragedy is that even theorists often have a hard time staying current with the theoretical developments in their field, because there are so many other theorists publishing new results. The same incentives that value publishing novel results apply to theoretical work as well. Theorists can often publish at a faster pace than experimentalists, because they don't have to spend time and money on experiments.
Genuine theoretical advances are often ignored or overlooked, because the incentives value novel results over simplifying and synthetizing known results. Fixing this, like many other issues with incentives, is much easier said than done.
