The problem boils down to the fact that all low hanging fruits in science have been picked, and therefore in order to identify new approaches we need scientists that can accumulate the existing knowledge, and then some.

This essentially results in a barrier that keeps getting higher and higher where most of the "science" is not significant and the percentage of useful science gets smaller and smaller.

This multiplicative barrier suggests that the scientists that will make progress need to get progressively smarter in order to jump over it.

Which implies that the choice is either eugenics, or breeding more humans so that more people at the higher end of the distribution of intelligence are available.

This is why I don't think it's feasible to repurpose existing people, it's just that doing science is becoming more difficult with every publication.

So unless there exists some kind of free-lunch, something that can accelerate the collective capacity of scientists, I don't think we can bypass the block.