I agree, in the current academic space, far too many individuals ask the questions they can most easily (quickly) and uncontroversially answer. They need one to three papers a year in the right journals to get tenure. Meanwhile, in business, anything longer than three years is accounted as a write off or a hedge. There are almost always less risky investments with same return in most cases.

I suspect most know they are asking the wrong questions. Which does not mean they will ask different questions in the current environment.

Most scientists of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries were independently wealthy. Ludwig Mises said it. Science was something they did because they enjoyed doing it. Result? No rush. More on point.

Alan Kay has a lecture at Carnegie Mellon, where he talks about the important problems in computer science.

Audience: That's great! Super! Now how do we get paid for working on these problems? How do we get paid for asking these questions? The answer, that science and income are different things, did not seem to satisfy the audience. Awkward silence.

I am unsure that we need to use any definition of security. We might take it as something to be solved for in the relevant problem context. We might not need to define our terms in advance. (Wheeler suggested this approach.) We might ask questions about decentralized systems without narrowing scope by using tacit definitions. ("N" is secure if "N interacting with M" is secure when "M" is also secure. That sort of thing.) We discover our proper scope in the relevant problem context gestalt.

By the way, Phys. Rev. E, not Nature, is now the place to look if you are interested in network phenomena, complex systems, etc, what is relevant today.