On the off chance that you are not just trolling...
You seem to have this retrospective view of technology creation where anything that didn't pan out or doesn't connect to current technology was therefore a waste of time and effort. The problem is that at the present nobody knows what's going to work out- you just have to try. Some ideas will work, some will not, some ideas will be lost and then re-discovered. It's a messy process. I'm sure there are robotics researchers who are wasting their time in dead end technologies. But I don't know which ones they are, and neither do you. I have opinions, but I'm not prescient.
You seem to have this retrospective view of technology creation where anything that didn't pan out or doesn't connect to current technology was therefore a waste of time and effort. The problem is that at the present nobody knows what's going to work out- you just have to try. Some ideas will work, some will not, some ideas will be lost and then re-discovered. It's a messy process. I'm sure there are robotics researchers who are wasting their time in dead end technologies. But I don't know which ones they are, and neither do you. I have opinions, but I'm not prescient.