The nice part about the Ph.D route is that you have guides to take you to the boundary and point it out to you. Plenty of people think they're at the boundary

The nice part about the Ph.D route is that you have guides to take you to the boundary and point it out to you. Plenty of people think they're at the boundary and pushing but are actually stuck at a (close in) local maxima of crackpottery. The real geniuses never even see a boundary. They just do their thing and let everyone else put labels on it later.