I get the sense that while astronomers had high hopes for JWST, no one predicted quite how much its observations would break existing theories of the universe. Does it matter to our lives that we can't explain all of this? No. Is it still worth pursuing? Absolutely. Do I understand half of it? Absolutely not. Still, very curious.
https://www.livescience.com/space/after-2-years-in-space-the-james-webb-telescope-has-broken-cosmology-can-it-be-fixed
@osma Sitting on pat theories is not only boring but you don't learn much. I'm an astronomer turned engineer and am fond of pointing out that when everything works as intended you don't learn anything. You learn things when something breaks, when something fails, when the bridge falls or the plane crashes. Unfortunate, but that's when you learn something.
For many years, Fermilab and CERN were focused on completing the Standard Model. When CERN identified the Higgs, the model was complete. Now what? Shut it down and go home? No, shut it down to build it up in order to run at even higher energies. The hope of most is to break the Standard Model. Then we'll learn something new.
It was hoped that JWST would be so good that it would seriously shake things up. It is doing that. Over the past 30 years we've observed things that make no sense given our current theories, but we couldn't see well enough to learn much. JWST is wrecking old theories left and right, and this is excellent.
@shuttersparks
This is the curious conflict between science and engineering - one wants known things to break to learn new things, the other would prefer already built things to not break - at least, not catastrophically. The good engineers have the scientists' curiosity about learning how things break, though.