Galileo slapping together lenses was incredibly "cutting edge" (pun intended) for its time. It was a brand new field dominated by very talented craftsman. It just seems quaint now. Though you may come from physics, I come from the field of neuroscience where there are literally so many unanswered questions that amateurs can discover things just by recording and analyzing animal behavior. See Bob Full's elegant work at Berkeley: high speed photography of animal locomotion that could have been done by an amateur willing to invest in equipment. Science is about asking the question, not the equipment you have. Perhaps this no longer holds for physics.

Science is often about asking the right question and the appropriate experimental design. The statements you make above have been repeated through the ages. We shall be continually be surprised by amateurs with curiosity. SpaceX and James Cameron's recent ocean dive could be considered to be done by rich "amateurs" who went professional.