Bjorken and Drell ('Relativistic Quantum Field-McGraw Hill 1965, out of print, on applying the formalism of local, causal fields):

"It is a gross and profound extrapolation of present experimental knowledge to assume that a wave description successful at large (10-8cm) distances may be [sic!] extended to, distances an indefinite number of orders of magnitude smaller (10-13cm).

...in relativistic theory we have seen that the assumption that the field description is correct in arbitrarily small space-time intervals has led-in perturbation theory- to divergent expressions for the electron self energy and "bare charge". Renormalisation theory has sidestepped these divergence difficulties which may be indicative of the failure of the perturbation expansion. However it is widely felt that the divergences are symptomatic of a chronic disorder in the small-distance behaviour of the theory.

...this notion of "microscopic causality" strongly forces us into the field concept. Even if there is a granularity at small distances , if we are to retain micro causality the influence of one "granule" upon the next must be retarded; the most natural way to describe this is with additional fields. The problem thus becomes more complicated, without corresponding gain in understanding...[indeed] a Hamiltonian may not exist for a non-local "granular" theory ..

There is no concrete experimental evidence of a granularity at small distances. There is likewise nothing but positive evidence that special relativity is correct in the high-energy domain....that the notion of microscopic causality is a correct hypotheses.

...it is undoubtedly true that a modified theory must have [such a] local field theory as an appropriate large distance approximation or 'correspondence'."

Nothing really changed then.

Interesting to revisit old texts - I bought this when it was already out of print in 1992. You brush over these introductory words when you are younger, no time to ponder the meaning of authors' choices, musings and the big picture; hard enough attending to the mathematical formalism. In later years all that is really accessible are the prefacing and summarising words of the authors. What a shame! The best minds of the time have parsed the mathematical frameworks for us and we barely see these efforts, which presumably many is the time, the last word written by the author.

Two points then:

1- In education, little or no research is spent on graduate learning. How best to transition the keen undergraduate to the next level of moving from appreciating theories to either tweaking or better critiquing and overhauling them?

2-A compilation of best introductory endeavours would be a worthy book.
There have been variations on this - Dawkins across the sciences, but none so focussed on fundamental physics that I have seen. Perhaps you have spotted some?