I don't think that any physicist would have been clever enough to have invented string theory on purpose... Luckily, it was invented by accident. - Edward Witten

Just around the same time that the string picture was formed, asymptotic freedom was discovered and made possible, in QCD, a more precise and successful theory of the strong interactions. Yet there has always been a striking analogy between QCD and string theory. If the hypothesis of quark confinement in QCD is true in its usual form, than a widely separated quark and antiquark are joined by a “color flux tube.” This has an obvious analogy to the notion of a meson as a string with charges at its ends, as assumed in string theory. Explaining this analogy would mean understanding quark confinement. This would be quite a nice achievement, since it is a longstanding sore point in theoretical physics that despite real experiments and computer simulations supporting the quark confinement hypothesis and despite a lot of ingenious work explaining qualitative criteria for quark confinement and why this notion is natural, there is no convincing, pencil and paper demonstration of quark confinement in QCD.

Good wrong ideas are extremely scarce... and good wrong ideas that even remotely rival the majesty of string theory have never been seen.

I would expect that a proper elucidation of what string theory really is all about would involve a revolution in our concepts of the basic laws of physics - similar in scope to any that occurred in the past.