Still working on a better explanation for that one than “No one wants to just pay people to sit around and think“

I've been asking around about that, and it might boil down to relative rarity of experimentalists. It's between one in three to one in twelve physicists, depending on year and colleague's universities.

For realsies, I don’t think experimentalism requires as much rigor and brilliance as theoretical work does.

Purely from my own experience, forgetting about the fact you first have to understand theoretical result and then come up with a way to make mindbogglingly subtle measurements (e.g. Beth experiment, anything I ever read about detecting Aharonov–Bohm effect, fucking LIGO), so far my only contributions to physics came as a result of either working with or consulting experimentalists. The last thing I got so excited about was a direct consequence of considering measurement difficulties followed by trying to be clever/mathy about it.

Maybe some string theory is half-cooked spaghetto. String theory’s kinda the extreme case, though.

I've been kinda harsh about ST, but it comes from a place of appreciation. It jump-started research into new avenues of mathematical physics, and it's important even if those were to pan out in decades to come. But, seeing how two most mathematically gifted people I met to date beelined there, I can't help thinking it's a brain-drain.

Here's where appreciation kicks in: I use ST tools. A lot. The clever/mathy thing? It might not have happened if not for attending SUSY seminar and leading professor's instruction on how to 'quickly' detect cases where gauge invariance shouldn't be taken for granted.

Fundamentally, I go out of my way to work closely with experimentalists because it's always a source of insights which, for the most part, are alien to my way of thinking. Both branches should do all they can to bridge the gap between disciplines. And having each other's perspective is a good reminder how impossibly clueless you can be outside your own field.