This was how the 18th Century worked. In the 19th Century mathematical language became rigorous and formal, better able to handle more complex constructions accurately, but harder for lay people to learn, as it became a new language.
Well... going by the Fermi biography and the first few chapters of The Idea Factory (about Bell Labs) I would think this is what it always sounds like in the early stages of humans discovering a new part of nature.
It's just that our most recent theories have been so rich that we have happened to discover many things theoretically before we find them in real life. (Theory has preceded practice in recent decades, rather than the other way around which is historically more common.) I'm not sure this will always be so, it might be a temporary leap.
