2m is pittance for professional astronomy. Hubble may have a 2.4m mirror, but remember that is a 1980s era telescope.
Current and future telescopes target 10-30m mirrors, purely for light capture reasons. We’d need to put something that big in space for it to be worthwhile.
No, even Hubble still delivers great contributions to science which are not quite matched by earthbound telescopes. Those win on aperture for sure, but Hubble is the only large telescope outside of the atmosphere. This gives access to wider wavelengths and removes all other atmospheric influences. That is the reason, the final passing of Hubble would be a huge loss, if not replaced.
There are several aspects we could improve on the current situation: make "better" telescopes or make more telescope. Having only 1, soon 0 space-based telescopes is cutting it very thin. Having 5-10 would increase our research a lot as more things could be observed.
Of course, eventually there will be a need for large space telescopes too, probably those will be enabled by Starship. But first we should use the currently available technology to make sure we don't fall back into the level of the 80ies when Hubble dies. And use modern technology to make this a "cheap" effort vs. the extremely expensive Hubble.
AO improvements over the past decade have made ground-based astronomy provide better images, with large enough apertures, than Hubble.
You are correct - the NIR is blocked by the atmosphere. That is why we are launching Webb. Optical, however, is very much now the domain of ground-based astronomy.
> Having only 1, soon 0 space-based telescopes is cutting it very thin. Having 5-10 would increase our research a lot as more things could be observed.
Apparently they went the other way and instead of multiple Hubble-equivalent telescopes they build one which has equivalent sharpness of images but a much larger field of view, so can take images 100 times as large as what Hubble can.
James Webb space telescope is scheduled in 6 months and it has a 6.5m segmented mirror.
A 2m telescope is pretty much useless, it doesn’t have enough angular resolution and it’s smaller than HST current mirror.
Current and future telescopes target 10-30m mirrors, purely for light capture reasons. We’d need to put something that big in space for it to be worthwhile.