Cool, but i want more. All we have so far is confirmations of rather well-understood interactions. I want "we see these massive waves, but have no idea what is causing them." If they are being seen, such results aren't published.
> All we have so far is confirmations of rather well-understood interactions.
Confirmations of commonly assumed interactions. This is vital, as numbers of other hypothesise/theories/other rely on that understanding. Without results like these all that work is on shaky ground, now it looks far more solid.
Confirming current understanding isn't as sexy as discovering new physics, but just as important, possibly more so.
That depends. I'd bet money that LIGO was not pitched on the idea that it would only confirm the existence of waves. New instruments are pitched on the expectation of novel measurements. the "new physics". The parallels to the LHC and other massively-expensive instruments are striking. They confirm something that has already been widely accepted, generate the expected prize and raft of phds, but when it is all over the universe hasn't changed. I worry that those greenlighting these projects are being too conservative, only investing in projects that have clear pathways. This trend matters. Physics needs these giant instruments to generate something truly new otherwise the billions will drift towards other disciplines.
You are wrong. The LHC was absolutely prepared to observe new "unexpected" (for the "Standard model") particles. It just didn't happen. A lot of theorists who had developed the theoretical extensions of the "Standard model" are disappointed about that, but that's what is observed.
Regarding the gravitational waves, you're also wrong, as the theory and the observations matched even without the gravitational waves being directly observed, the science is simply so good that completely unexpected results (in the sense you talk) are outside of the resulting limits of the previous measurements and calculations.
The level of the science we have now is really stunning. The only sad part of the story is that all investments in the science are really minute compared to all the money spent on armies and weapons (e.g. just as the order of magnitude one year of the US military budget is at least 30 times bigger than the NASA's).
There's immense amount of the new information that can be obtained by the repeated observations. But the expectation of anything to disprove too much of what we know up to now is simply not realistic.
LIGO is a new telescope. Everyone is hoping that, like every other form of telescope ever built, it will 'see' things that we didn't know were out there. There are lists of unexplained phenomena that telescopes see very regularly. Trying to explain such observations is the forefront of astronomy and physics (see dark matter/energy). But this telescope has yet to add to the lists.
This is a huge observation, and many more insights are to come, and that this one or the previous three didn't add to that list you'd wish to be added to doesn't in any way diminish the achievement.
You're misunderstanding the purpose of LIGO. LIGO is partly a physics experiment to confirm general relativity, like Gravity Probe B, but mostly an astronomical observatory. All astronomy before was based on electromagnetic waves (light, then radio, UV, IR, Xray, gamma). This is a completely separate information source about the behavior of stars and will have a huge impact on astrophysics.
LIGO may or may not turn up "new physics," but I for one think it's already plenty exciting to (i) confirm the predictions of GR (not a given), and (ii) be able to "see" the state of the universe through this new instrument -- there's more to (astro)physics than just the relevant physical laws.
