The ultimate goal of physics is to understand all structures and behaviors of nature, which has a profoundly appealing aspect. Hence, during my university engineering studies, I considered switching to the physics curriculum. However, after attending a few courses on particle physics, it became apparent to me that physics consisted of a patchwork of theories, and the approach towards reducing the discrepancies did, in my opinion, hardly produce major results.
At the end of the 1990s, I started to take a serious look at physics again. The Internet provided easy access to the resources necessary to scan a wide variety of formally published and educational material. The arXiv has been a particularly useful resource for articles on a variety of topics in fundamental physics.
After a several years of parsing a vast amount of material, once more, I regrettably concluded that the current attempts to unify physics are unlikely to succeed. In fact, it seems to me that, over the years, physics has become vastly more abstract and the theories supposedly describing reality are often artificial. When the modern physics literature is compared with publications from the first half of the 1900s, there is a noticeable difference in terms of the quality and struggles to pursue a reality-based description. This is, among others, exemplified by the books published by Louis de Broglie. From my sideline perspective, it appears that e.g. unified field theories, quantum computing, cosmology, and condensed matter theory have a substantial degree of artificial content, which inhibits true understanding of the structure and behavior of nature.
After my opinion about the status of main-stream physics settled, I started to consider alternative less accepted paths pursued by professional and amateur physicists. Much of this work appears to suffer from the same kind of problems as the mathematically more subtle ways pursued by main-stream physicists. However, I believe there exists a single exception of an approach towards physics that is most promising in its attempt to understand nature in a unified way at every level of complexity. This alternative way is closely aligned to the original ideas of Louis de Broglie and is considerably different from the approaches pursued by the majority of physicist. Unfortunately, the work of the physicist who originated these ideas is apparently not accepted by the current physics community, since it is hardly referenced. Reports of this physicist can be found in the arXiv.