I think we probably agree on the core issue, I just kept things a bit too brief.

There are people who feel like I described, and there are people who disagree to varying degrees (physicists, amitrite?). But I do think we all kind-of agree that we'd prefer to find experimental results that break the standard model vs proving it right now, but it seems unlikely we're going to find that smoking gun anytime soon. The model is an attempt at fitting data and like you said it works in the regime it was designed for, but it can't be _the_ theory of everything. It would be great if it broke somehow so we could investigate _why_ and drive new avenues of research based on that which might be more promising in resolving gravity and the other forces (or the anti-matter mystery, or shed some light on what dark-matter is)*

As the OP said, it's still good science if we prove that the current theory holds up, but no one is really happy with it at this point because everyone knows it's not going to be the final unified theory that we all want to see

---- * personaly I have a gut feeling those three are going to be resolved in rapid succesion if they're ever solved