What makes Alcubierre's idea so clever is that it doesn't actually violate Einsteinian physics. The ship would be motionless inside the "warp bubble" and even experience microgravity, because it's the bubble which is propagating through space carrying the ship along with it. And notice I couldn't even bring myself to say "move", because it's a phenomenon, not a real thing but a momentary configuration of spacetime whose coordinates are continually translated. But nothing moves and Einstein still rules.

Not that you're not right about the principle of better measurements revealing new things. Precision's always a good thing. But there's a conceptual limitation, which I think of every time I hear Spock utter the cliche something like "I'm detecting an unknown form of radiation, Captain!". And I want to yell back at the Vulcan to say "Spock, that's completely illogical! How can you build an instrument to detect something you didn't know existed?"

I think the point, if any, of that small parable is that it seems like theorists have to first think of something before the experimentalists can build the apparatus to look for it or test the proposition. Better instruments alone can't make the really fundamental breakthroughs in physics.