String theory has completely dominated the field of theoretical high energy physics for decades. There have been some notable contrarians, e.g., Smolin and Woit with their books. But those haven't changed the fact that it has been very hard to get a faculty position in theoretical hep for decades without being a string theorist. It is only the last few years that has changed. In other words, it's not a biased view that string theory has completely dominated the field for more than 30 years.
Btw, the reason we aren't reading Feynman's take is that he died in 1988, not that he's too busy doing physics. He was very successful in doing both high quality physics and expanding his popular reach.
That's just not true. Look at the statistics for hiring faculty in theoretical high energy physics [1]. String theory was never more than half, and usually much less than that. (It is true, though, that for a while they had a near monopoly on pop physics. But that's totally different from physics.)
His statement can be true if you restrict it to "quantum gravity" jobs (of which string theory is one of many approaches, abeit the overwhelmingly most popular one). The other jobs you're talking about just don't try to answer the questions that string theory purports to addresses.
That is like understanding programming jobs as embedded Erlang. The thing is, that journalists really like to write about quantum gravity, but almost all theoretical physicist work on something else. (Roughly in the same sense that most lawyers don't work at the White House.)
I'm well aware of the distribution of theory jobs and what journalists like to write about. The point is that phenomenologists (and relativists, etc.) are necessary regardless of how dominant strings is. "All theory jobs" was simply a mistaken choice of category.
Despite its drawbacks string theory may actually be our best theory of quantum gravity, perhaps even enough to justify its hiring ratio relative to other quantum gravity theories. Maybe string theory has been treated in a balanced way all along.
Maybe, or maybe not. My personal opinion is that even thirty years ago it seemed stupid to bet almost all resources on a theory that was too complex for anyone to even produce any testable predictions. And I think it is even more stupid now, when the main result of the theory seems to be that it's not possible to use it for any prediction (10^500 possible universes, it's not possible to say which one).
There has to be a couple of orders of magnitude difference between "funders thought it was the best bet for quantum gravity," and "it was all physicists did for thirty years, full stop."
I, nor anyone else I saw (I haven't read all comments), have claimed that that was what physics did for thirty years. If you read my comments you'll see that I have been quite careful to qualify my statements when it hasn't been blaringly obvious from context.
Im a physicist, and whilst Im an experimentalist, I work in the same departments as theorists and I don't know a single string theorist. I heard of one, once. A friend od a friend, but I never met them. Most high energy physicists seem to be working on supersymmetry.
I am not a physicist, but I listen to a lot of technical lectures from the institute of advanced study and other universities that post their colloquia on youtube, and the impression I've gotten is that string theory has pretty much fused with quantum field theory. A lot of the people in the string theory discussions identify themselves simply as field theorists, with string theories being just another set of concepts in their model-building tool box.
Btw, the reason we aren't reading Feynman's take is that he died in 1988, not that he's too busy doing physics. He was very successful in doing both high quality physics and expanding his popular reach.