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RE: What does an experimental particle physicist do: Measure particles!
Indirectly yes: top quarks can be reconstructed from their decay products, and lighter quarks will form jets of composite states that one can observe and whose properties can be measured.
Didn't entirely understand you, the decay products and reconstruction of top quarks part to be specific. How do we detect these decay products and bring them together to make a quark?? What precision does it take? But this does remind me that I have a book which might help... Thanks for your answer though.
The top quark is special in the sense that it decays into a bottom quark and a W-boson very promptly, so that it has no time to do anything else. We can reconstruct it from the measurement of the properties of the decay products that can be somehow identified.
For the light quark stuff, please check my answer below and this link.
Does it help?
Now I see what you meant by reconstruction from decay products... I will still dig into the fermions and bosons... I only know a little bit about them.
If you want, you can have a look to my last posts where I started to write particle physics lecture notes for steemit. This is a kind of starter (see here for the lecture number 1 which may answer your fermionic/bosonic question).