This has been brought up before. Touched on in this thread [url]https://forum.atlas-games.com/t/original-research-analysis-with-warping-points/390/1]
My general conclusion is similar to others. The Breakthrough rules are there for players to use not to reflect the reality of the game world.
The rules are written so a character that is well built, well played, and sacrifices an appropriate amount of time and energy to Original Research has a reasonably good chance of getting a Breakthrough. Further they should be able to do it over the span of an average saga with time left to bask in the glory and/or suffer the fallout.
If the rules were written to simulate the no Hermetic Breakthroughs in over 4 centuries the setting presents then IMOHO no one would bother trying Original Research.
That being said it's still up to story guides to adjust the difficulty for whats appropriate to their sagas. As the the Errata for HoH:TL actually makes the base odds a lot better then what Callen figured. Since the errata lets you double dip your modifier first adding it then adjusting up or down if necessary. So with a +3 it's every roll between 4 and 10 (with the exclusion of 5 probably*) that results in a discovery and roll agains happen on any roll 9+. So a character with a MT11 and no chance to botch seems to have a better then 50% chance of getting a discovery and a better then 80% chance of stabilizing. That drops you down into it taking 30-40 seasons to get 11 stabilized breakthroughs. You will also suck up a royal ton of warping and have to play through 4 or more story events.
*It is even arguable that by a strict reading of the errata you can still get a Discovery "in addition to" a Complete Failure result (5+3 in this case) on your initial experiment. This raises the odds for the above mentioned character getting a discovery to almost 70%. So on average it would take less than 30 seasons to make 11 stabilized discoveries