As well as what the other commenters are saying, sometimes deeper stuff takes longer to have an impact. If you look through the history of science (and human endeavor more generally), there are many famous examples of people whose work revolutionized our modern world, but who weren't recognized in their lifetime - society needed time to catch up.

Now I think we can do a lot better than that. We're a global civilization that communicates at lightspeed. However, we are still also big hairless apes with CPUs made of electric jelly, so we take a while to process things. The more unexpected, the more processing we need.