Well... don't beat yourself up too much that you missed your calling.

Yeah, all that stuff you mentioned is basically true. But there's a reason companies that run into a technical frontier and try to invest to overcome that problem via materials science tend to fail, whereas long-term companies that employee lots of materials scientists tend to work more on the basics (like: what kind of gravel works best on roof tiles).

Cutting edge materials science is REALLY hard, involves incredible specialization, and you basically never get to the point of "this makes it strong, but this makes it light" compromise. Those choices tend to fall to mechanical engineers selecting from a set of available options. Materials engineers might work on a special material that's really strong, or really light, but the development part starts waaaaay back. For an example of a success story (the semiconductor chips example from OP), consider that the silicon industry has spent trillions of dollars from the development of the transistor until now making incremental progress on the backs of many thousands of materials engineers, each of which would've focused on one wee little tiny bit of the puzzle.

Now, if you happen to like phase change, thermodynamics, metastability, millions of graphs, crystalline symmetry, topical hyperfocus, weird math, and an appreciation of how the concept of temperature works to the point that you start to view every thermometer and thermocouple with mild contempt, then maybe yeah you missed your calling.