physics get ugly when it doesn't understand what's happening

Particle physics is a really strange field. When there were just protons, neutrons and electrons everything sort of made sense, and as higher and higher energies and smaller scales come into play, the universe seems to be sprouting more and more particles again. String theorists try to simplify things but all they really do is add more dimensions to explain different particles, until you have one particle but upteen dimensions. That's not simpler!

Look at dark energy / dark matter in astronomy - because some observations didn't really make sense, astrophysicists had to add really odd 'patches' onto their model to explain what they were seeing. Problem here is that 'dark' essentially means 'experimentally unverifiable' so we're going to have to take some things on faith. Which would be fine, if the things weren't inherently contradictory.

In both cases, it just feels like a really elegant model had to have hacks or bodges added to explain experimental data.

prior art

Reminds me of epicycles in astronomy ( https://study.com/academy/lesson/ptolemy-theory-of-the-universe-lesson-for-kids.html )

TLDR - basically, the motion of planets made no sense so Ptolemy invented a hack - each planet wiggled as it orbited. It felt weird to everybody but the numbers checked out, so they went with it.

Then somebody decided to predict how things would look without any ugly hacks, but with the Earth not at the centre of the universe, and everything got simple and elegant again.

Conversely, it can also turn out to be more complicated after all. Mercurys orbit had an anomaly that Newtonian physics couldn't explain, and eventually Einsteins relativity correctly accounted for it. But although some people would say relativity is elegant, it's not exactly intuitive like newtons laws were.

ideal scenario

I think with very large and very small scale physics, we are looking at the problem the wrong way. We already know that reality has a 'resolution' - the "Planck length" ( https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae281.cfm ) which is in itself incredibly weird.

I think a fresh pair of eyes on the problem might surprise everybody with how simple things actually are. I just don't know where those eyes are going to come from.

Oddly, I think machine learning will throw some light on things.

It's worth bearing in mind we have brains that were evolved to make sure we got enough bananas, made it with hot lady apes and didn't get eaten along the way. We may just not be wired the right way to understand cosmic scale processes that don't directly impact those needs.