I have been part of the scientific community for over 10 years. Science is amazing. It's like, the best thing ever. But sometimes doing science can drive me crazy. First of all, progress is slow. It was slow when I worked on the LHC, it was slow now that I work in medical physics. Part of that is my fault. I get mired in the details, trying to get everything to come out right. But data does not always cooperate. And sometimes you have to settle for good enough.
Which comes to my second complaint about science: publishing. I'm more and more getting the impression that people publish articles on analyses that are "good enough" because of the pressure to publish if you want to keep your job, get your next one, or get tenure. As long as the science is solid, fine, but that doesn't mean it really deserves publishing. Sometimes it is something that needs more work, or more data, and then they'd have a good, solid results worthy of being read by the wider community. Sometimes it is something that has made an improvement on an existing idea. But the improvement is so small, it doesn't seem worth the effort. Sometimes it is an idea that sounds good on paper, and sort of works in reality, but not really well enough. It is not good enough to actually make a difference. In the medical physics world, difference is something that can be adopted clinically, or tell us something meaningful about how humans work (such as from functional MRI studies of the brain).
I'm a post-doctoral research fellow, a.k.a. "post-doc". That means I have my Ph.D. (only took 6 years!) and am now essentially getting additional training before I can venture off on my own. Graduate students and post-docs get paid notoriously low. I haven't minded too much; my needs are simple (unlimited information and entertainment from the internet, only $60/mo). But partly because of this, the system these days favor labs with a few professors, and a lot of post-docs and grad students. But given the low ratio of faculty to trainees, those trainees inevitably will not all find themselves more permanent faculty (or even senior scientist) jobs.
There have been a lot of studies and articles on this issue. And a nice PhD comics cartoon: The funding climate