Occam’s razor, not to multiply causes unnecessarily, is the pruning hook of science, but the standard model is the opposite. Particle physics was once just about mass, charge, and spin, but now it has isospin, hypercharge, color, chirality, flavor, and other esoteric features. The standard model today needs sixty-two particles (Note 1), five fields, sixteen charges, and fourteen bosons to work (Table 4.6). If it was a machine, one would have to hand-set over two dozen knobs just right for it to light up, so it isn’t preferred today because it is simple.
For this complexity, one might expect completeness, but the standard model can’t explain gravity, proton stability, anti-matter, quark charges, neutrino mass, neutrino spin, family generations, or the dark energy and matter that constitute 95% of the universe.
Its main feature is that with each new finding, it grows, so to explain inflation it needs a hypothetical symmetron field, and to explain neutrino mass it needs another 7-8 arbitrary constants:
Good theories grow knowledge when given data, just as good gardens grow plants when given water. In contrast, new data just makes the standard model bigger, like a sponge that absorbs water but is itself barren. Multiplying causes unnecessarily has produced a model that goes against science, but the scientific landscape around it is stagnant for the same reason, which is that inventing virtual particles to explain equations after the fact is science in reverse.
Note1. Two leptons with three generations plus anti-matter variants is 12. Two quarks with three generations plus anti-matter variants and three colors is 36. Plus one photon, eight gluons, three weak bosons, one graviton and the Higgs is another 14. The total is 62.