For real world everyday problems normally it is an application of already solved theory or it isn't worth working on at all. We still need researchers to look at and expand our theory which in turn allows us to solve more problems in the real world. And there are real world problems that we pour enormous amounts of effort into solving despite lacking theory, but these areas move much slower than the much more common application of already solved theory and so are vastly vastly more expensive. (this is how we get smaller chip architectures, but it is a planet scale problem to solve)