I remember reading a post earlier this year on a forum where someone was arguing that lenses for wildlife were going to be big and heavy no matter what format you used, and that the physics of light going through glass wasn't going to change. As a student of photographic history, I disagreed. I was aware of how rapid spurts of technology could quickly change everything virtually overnight. (e.g. going from wet collodion to film in 1881.) Another example is lens coatings from ~1946 which allowed for the multi-element lenses we have today.
Kent in SD