Not sure what your “chain of transformations”, “rearranging, substituting, etc.” refer to. IMO is never about painful and tricky computations; if there’s such a

Not sure what your “chain of transformations”, “rearranging, substituting, etc.” refer to. IMO is never about painful and tricky computations; if there’s such a problem it’s really a failure of the Problem Selection Committee. IMO is all about elegant problems in elementary mathematics that require unusual insight (which does tend toward usual when you’ve seen enough of them, but there are always surprises), spark of genius if you may. The best problems tend to be blissfully obvious in hind sight. While you may argue that, for instance, for elementary number theory there are only so many theorems and tricks you can perform, and in fact you can compile such a list right now (which obviously won’t work for combinatorics), brute forcing your way by applying every trick to every degree of freedom of a problem will probably lead you nowhere.