When you say "personally done research" do you mean that you have done experimental work in a virology or a related field? FWIW, I have a PhD in biophysics, a part of my dissertation was on the structure of some viral proteins and antibodies to them. On occasion I still read original papers in the field cause I find pictures of protein structures very sexy. However, I'd never say that I understand the current situation well enough to make any predictions.
Here is why it's so complex. Most common vaccines in our daily lives are protein sub-unit vaccines (either peptide-based or culture-based) where bits of the virus are manufactured and injected directly into the body to cause an immune response. As you can imagine, once that portion of the virus mutates, the antibodies to that protein will not be useful as a defense mechanism.
In case of COVID-19, the vaccine research has taken a very different path than the typical flu (which the benefits of vaccination have to be balance against the side effects and the cost of manufacturing/storage/inoculation). Of course, there are at least two protein sub-unit vaccines in late testing which are based on rather large chunks of the viral envelope (from what I've read) which is cheap and possibly effective, but efficiency is questionable and side effects are high. There are also several mRNA vaccines in late testing (Pfizer announcement is about one of them) where they inject a delivery vehicle (probably a phage of some sort) with chunks of the COVID-19 mRNA which forces our cells to manufacture these proteins, which in turn cause the immune response. Finally, there are several vector vaccines where a component/components of the COVID virus are integrated into a delivery virus (e.g Russian vaccine is a corona-virus surface protein vector that's integrated into an adenovirus). With the latter two methods, it is possible to achieve very high degrees of immune response in healthy people and, with the right boosters, you can maintain it even against mutated virus because of the diversity of the antibodies.
PS. there is also a separate thread of COVID immunity research that focuses on memory cell immunity - some indications are there that people who've been exposed to other coronaviruses tend to be asymptomatic when exposed to COVID-19.
