Old school retired dentist here:
there has been an academically inspired program called CAMBRA... Which stands for "Caries Management by Risk Assessment" (or something like that). Here is a link to one of the many sites that come up if you Google "CAMBRA"...
CAMBRA: The New Model for Managing Caries | Dentalcompare.com
IMO, the main motivation of the program was/is to deal with high caries rates, particularly in "underserved" populations, which is the politically correct way of saying "poor kids with bad diets, and parents who fill their glasses with Pepsi, and their plates with crappy, high sugar foods...." or something to that effect.
What we know: if we reduce in between meal sugars, and at least once/day clean all surfaces of all teeth (sorry folks, that means you gotta floss, or use some sort of mechanical device to reach where the brush, even the expensive SONICARE brush won't reach), you won't have much of a problem with caries. Unless you have some other overriding issues such as diabetes, or severely dry mouth, you'll have very few problems. And if you do have such overriding issues, you will fare much better if you take the above mentioned steps.
Another thing we know: Many people just don't take those steps, and in lower socio-economic groups, the percentages of people who don't take those steps is staggering, and the ones who suffer the most are the children. Hence, an effort such as CAMBRA to try to achieve a lower caries rate among those who, for whatever reasons, are suffering the effects of high caries rates.
I studied this, and I found a few problems with it. Among those was that it still required some patient compliance. Well, guess what? If folks are finding the basic stuff I described above too much work to incorporate into their daily lives (really folks? I can brush and floss my teeth in less than 3 minutes), then they are not very likely to follow the directives of CAMBRA.
But, academics need to have something to research, and justify their grants. So there's that.