FWIW, Scott Aaronson has likened the question on factorization of concrete instances to what happened during the Manhattan Project:
> Joe #11: Then you’ll be waiting a long time, because that’s a stupid metric. (Or rather: anyone willing to use that metric today, is probably someone you shouldn’t trust.) It’s almost exactly analogous to judging the Manhattan Project in 1942, 1943, 1944 by the metric “how big an explosion can you make, today?” I.e., it’s something that’s going to be basically flat for a long time and then undergo a step change, under the assumption that everything is progressing as it should—because you need a critical mass in the one case and to exceed the fault-tolerance threshold in the other.
> Joe #11: Then you’ll be waiting a long time, because that’s a stupid metric. (Or rather: anyone willing to use that metric today, is probably someone you shouldn’t trust.) It’s almost exactly analogous to judging the Manhattan Project in 1942, 1943, 1944 by the metric “how big an explosion can you make, today?” I.e., it’s something that’s going to be basically flat for a long time and then undergo a step change, under the assumption that everything is progressing as it should—because you need a critical mass in the one case and to exceed the fault-tolerance threshold in the other.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4121#comment-1804101