Is hep-ph getting saturated?

The reason I am losing interest nowadays in hep-ph is because of its super saturated state at present. Whenever some new ideas come to my mind, after I search in the Internet, I come to know that lots of work have been done on it. There are thousands of papers nowadays which address the same problem from different perspectives. I can not see any good way to do things except incorporating some ad hoc stuffs (hypothesis) just to make my work look different from others. Although the situation here is not as bad as the string landscape, yet string theory nowadays look more interesting, especially after the AdS-CFT came into business. If we keep the landscape problem aside, we can do many things using string theory and apply them to various other fields and try to match the results with observations. Although such matching does not verify string theory, yet it at least justifies the use of string theory as a mathematical tool. During the Asian Winter school, I was greatly fascinated by various talks related to applications of string theory in superconductivity, RHIC etc. I do not know if I need to learn a great details of string theory to work on such interdisciplinary fields, but I would love to do such stuffs. I am looking forward to Shiraz's lectures on AdS-CFT and hydrodynamics at the SERC main school in April,2010. His four lectures (one hour duration each) in the Asian school were not adequate for me to learn the subject in details, but just to get an overview.