The problem with this approach is that progress here is viewed like a brick wall you build.

You don't get progress from just burning a lot of wood in 1400s. You can get it if that wood is burnt with the goal of, I dunno, making better metal or bricks for some specific mechanism.

Same with our time, how can they expect solutions of problems to be found when they don't understand what they are trying to find?

It's like a cargo cult - "white people had this thing and it could fly and drop cargo, so we must reproduce its shape and we'll be rich", only in this case it's even dumber - nobody has seen the things they are trying to reach anywhere outside of space opera series.

What differentiates IT from most other engineering areas is that most of people doing it solve abstract tasks in abstract environments, defined by social and market demand. They are, sadly, simply a grade below real engineers and scientists for that reason alone.