Asklemmy

As a nano engineer, youre 100% right - with the added slowdowns of safety research. Many of these particles are entirely different beasts on a nanoscale, an example commonly used is microscopic copper is just copper, nanoscopic will have you dead within the hour if inhaled (dont quote my timeframe on that one).

That being said many cool materials are still coming out, just aren't yet at that commercialized availability level yet.

For example graphene has the potential to replace copper -at least in high performance applications- cause its got some fucked levels of conductivity

Edit for some more examples cause I'm a nerd about this stuff:

Carbon nanotubes make vantablack, the material that can absorb 99.9% of visible light (not that exciting beyond a party trick commercially, but in areas trying to minimize electromagnetic noise this is revolutionary).

Silver nanoparticles have been shown to have passive disinfectant properties, leading to the possibility of a cloth that you could run dirty water through and make it drinkable.

And my favorite being we've already created the carbon based structures (can't recall if it was nanotubes specifically) with theoretically high enough tensile strength that if made a couple kilometers long could be used to lasso an asteroid and create a space elavator