. And it bears stressing that the soft tissues, blood vessels etc in dino bones were only discovered by accident , not deliberate research

I am not sure of your point, Pete. For ease of communication I will label 'research' as about looking for something you expect (or to check it isn't here) whereas 'discovery' is finding something unexpected. That is an incredibly crude approximation, but it does allow us to make the distinction I want to examine. Now, it is not really practical to do entirely speculative research because of limits on resources. The large hadron collider, for example, wasn't built like that just on speculation: there was a lot of information on what Higgs must be like and how it must behave if it existed so you knew the sort of detectors that would be needed and so on. It wasn't just built on a vague hope. Similarly, it would not be practical to search for surviving DNA unless you had a good idea where it would be, what would be needed to detect whatever the surviving amount would be and so on and so forth. Then there is what is called the 'opportunity cost': people who are busy searching through piles of bones can't do other work which has a better prospect of finding something. So reality does limit prospects for research.

On the other hand if a scientist notices something unexpected, in the ideal world they would then take it, investigate further and so on. That's what I mean by 'a discovery' and a heck of a lot of things have been found that way.

Then I say "in the ideal world'. Like the rest of us, whatever you imagine from films and tv, scientists also live in the world of time sheet filling, pointless meetings, monthly reports into bureaucracies and all that palaver. And that bureaucracy often limits the ability to explore discoveries. Let me repeat: it is not the scientists choosing not to do the research, it is organisations saying we are funding you to research into medicines to deal with Ebola, or whatever; we don't authorise you to look into something off the side just because it interests you.

So that is why I am not sure of your point.