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Even Einstein Doubted His Gravitational Waves (astronomy.com)
Flash Modin writes: In 1936, twenty years after Albert Einstein introduced the concept, the great physicist took another look at his math and came to a surprising conclusion. 'Together with a young collaborator, I arrived at the interesting result that gravitational waves do not exist, though they had been assumed a certainty to the first approximation,' he wrote in a letter to friend Max Born. Interestingly, his research denouncing gravitational waves was rejected by Physical Review Letters, the journal that just published proof of their existence. The story shows that even when Einstein's wrong, it's because he was already right the first time.
You are aware that mass energy equivalence is by *far* not his only outstanding work, right? Brownian movement? Photoelectric effect (Nobel prize, by the way)? Special relativity? General relativity? If every researcher had the impact of only one of his papers, we would be travelling through wormholes and be in a post-physical society by now.
E=mc^2 was derived from special relativity, not the basis of special relativity. Einstein becase famous because of his theories of relativity, not because of E=mc^2. If you paid more attention to physics and less attention to pop-science, perhaps you'd begin to understand.