This is kind of like saying that the first person harvesting an apple orchard is better than the people that come after because they get to pick the low hanging fruit.

If you dug them out of their graves and presented the scientific world as we have it now it's highly likely they'd see the predicaments we are in now and a whole lot of that technological progress would be different. Turned out running economies on leaded gas burns up atmospheres and brains. Turns out that physics didn't have unlimited secrets to divulge without ever increasing amounts of effort and energy being applied to discover them.