a society that values meatheads over scientists
This is a very bad misreading of how Clan society works and also a common misconception.
A trueborn warrior has to be a Nietzschean übermensch in every sense. The castes are hierarchical, yes, but that in turn means a warrior has to be strong enough to be a laborer, smart enough to be a scientist, cunning enough to be a merchant, skilled enough to be a technician,
and deadly enough to be a warrior. Anyone who fails this at any level washes out into a lower caste. "Meatheads" don't make it into the warrior caste, they wash out and become laborers. Dumb but tough isn't enough to cut it.
The freeborn populations have breeding programs too (conducted the old-fashioned way through arranged marriages), and a similar level of rigor in job selection, they just don't get the resources that are dumped into the warrior gene selection and breeding program (except for what the Society was tinkering with).
Now this does create a problem of a "brain drain" of the best and brightest from warrior sibkos passing over the scientist caste because they qualified for a better job, but I'd argue it's no worse than the brain drain effect Wall Street and law schools impose on science in our society.
Where the Clans run into a problem is their systemic gerontophobia. It's a society that is by-and-large run by people under 30, with a handful of "old-timers" kept around because of exceptional ability. Anyone who has seen a college dorm knows this is a disastrously bad way to run a society, but it also makes the Clans a lot of fun. It's like a vapid reality show, but with lots of guns.
There are areas where Clan science should obviously have stagnated through lack of resources, but weapons development is not one of them.
ComStar, on the other hand is a fantastic example of shooting oneself in the foot. They
literally worship technology, at least in the post-Toyamist era through to the WoB schism. Everything the Star League came up with is holy to them. Technical manuals are actually read with reverence like they were scripture. ComStar's entire thing was believing that the people of the Star League were somehow enlightened and they were carrying out a sacred duty of keeping the flame alive until the
Second Coming Star League returned.
You don't go rewriting your holy books because you think they could be improved, that's called
heresy and people fight (very silly, but no less brutal) wars over it. ROM had a whole division dedicated to enforcing correct thought among the faithful.
Developing new technology would mean acknowledging the old technology had room for improvement, which means it isn't perfect, which means it isn't holy, which means--
Oh, crap.
This is one of my biggest gripes about the WoB jihad, all that über-tech the Master pulled out of his ass should have been considered heresy and punished as such. It doesn't comport with what was established about old ComStar or the WoB in the several decades of prior lore.