When Hubble looked at Pluto, it was a low-detail blur ("The Hubble raw images are a few pixels wide"), and that's within our solar system. https://esahubble.org/images/opo1006h/
Remember, the first exoplanet was detected in 1992, and not by imaging; prior to that we didn't even know if they existed at all. JWST's planning started in 1996.
There is a fundamental physics limit at play here: the diffraction limit is linear with the aperture diameter and gives an upper bound on the resolution of a telescope. Having a longer exposure doesn't help - that's for resolving very faint objects (more light collected -> higher signal-to-noise). To resolve a building-sized object on an exoplanet, regardless of its intensity, we'd need a telescope the size of the solar system. There are some proposals to use the gravitational lensing of our sun to create such a telescope, but those projects are decades at least from implementation.
Need a really big mirror, like size of planet to start with.
Another neat idea is to use the Sun as a gravitational lens. But you you would need it put it way past Pluto to get proper focus. So maybe another hundred years to get tech and resources to that point.
Yes, and if we do a spectral analysis on a small rocky exoplanet and find a bunch of oxygen, that tells us a lot more exciting information than the 2x2 pixels you might get from an image of it.
How much details we can see if based on the wavelength of light and the diameter of the telescope. And if you worked it out, the telescope diameter would have to be enormous.
However gravity can bend light so there is some thought of using the sun as a lens. However the observation would have to be pretty far away from our sun so its just wishful thinking in our lifetime.
It’s because those planets are incredibly far away. The distance is so huge, there is no way to even picture it. It would be a single pixel on any telescope we could conceivably build. What we can do though is measure the chemical composition of their atmospheres. This could be very interesting if we found some hallmarks of life on a rocky planet.
If you're not inspired by these images and the accompanying detail on why they are being taken (especially the exoplanet spectroscopic surveys) then you just aren't thinking hard enough about them.
Why am I so stupid but isn’t this the obvious thing to do?