I am a one year in my MSc program, research based. At the beginning of my program my advisor promised to pay for my fee for AT LEAST one year. Now he stopped paying me even though he has the fund for the project related to something he assigned me to do in the first place.

With not much of guidance, I wasted one year of my time doing things that weren't working. Until recently he asked me to write a proposal that could help me to have enough data to write my thesis. One part of the project was his idea, which I thought wasn't a good practical or promising way for industry potential. My project is about developing a raw material for a polymer. True enough I later found a good and promising method that was not from his idea and I was so excited thinking that I finally can do something that is useful for the industry and write a good journal paper.

After talking to him about it, he insisted that I should proceed to work on his idea and not to be distracted by my findings, saying that the chemical that I am using to synthesise the material is too costly (less than USD120 per liter for a reagent grade, plus, the material is being used in some applications in the industry - how could he said that is an exotic chemical that we might not be able to find or buy later?).

Perhaps it is just me but now I am left feeling demotivated, pissed and not knowing what to do and how to defend my thesis (how to defend such thing when you know there is a better approach?). I want to do something that is useful and contribute to the industry, I want to write & publish in a good journal, I want something that can help me to find a good job when I graduate yet up to now, I haven't got anything of that.

Can someone tell me what a supervisor should do and what are the characteristic of a good supervisor? And what I should do in my situation?