Why not be a “practical” quant? There are still fundamental and useful areas of research to focus your considerable talents on.

Black, Scholes, and Merton showed valuing an option assuming the underlying follows geometric Brownian motion did not depend on the growth rate but that does not accord with reality, or even prior theory. Continuous time trading is a mathematical fiction.

If stock price starts gyrating traders will update their estimate of volatility. If stock price takes off they will go naked on call options to capture that. Where’s the theory for that?