Darwin was independently wealthy and had no need to work, like many of the 19th century luminaries of science.
No one will pay you to take your sweet time for several decades and publish if and when you are ready to revolutionize a field. You have to get enough done on a short timescale (a few years for a project that produces a handful of papers is fine) for funded work. Most of us also do have our unfunded pet projects that simmer on the back burner for longer, but these don't get anything like full time effort.
And this is mostly as it should be. You write software with short functions and tests, commit by commit, and release and revise episodically. Releasing one enormous, monolithic product after working in secret for 20 years produces science as awful as it does software, for the same reasons.
No one will pay you to take your sweet time for several decades and publish if and when you are ready to revolutionize a field. You have to get enough done on a short timescale (a few years for a project that produces a handful of papers is fine) for funded work. Most of us also do have our unfunded pet projects that simmer on the back burner for longer, but these don't get anything like full time effort.
And this is mostly as it should be. You write software with short functions and tests, commit by commit, and release and revise episodically. Releasing one enormous, monolithic product after working in secret for 20 years produces science as awful as it does software, for the same reasons.