I kind of dislike cosmological / astronomical science. It's strictly non interacting. It's predicting a function of only output and not inputs. Sure, the number of outputs is large. But without any inputs, it's just a funny compression competition.

So long as we can't interact with it, I don't think there's any way to distinguish between ideas. Note that the only reason Newton managed to surpass his predecessors was because of his insight that whatever it was that's pulling the stars is also the same thing we have locally. Without having something to play with locally, we'd never get anywhere. Sure, you might realize that somehow the epicirles are actually ellipses, or find this or that correction. Still you'll get nowhere without something interactive and local.