As a counterpoint, I’ve heard of individuals building entire careers by making obvious and incremental improvements to current methods; each increment is at lea

As a counterpoint, I’ve heard of individuals building entire careers by making obvious and incremental improvements to current methods; each increment is at least one paper and they add up fast. Then the methods and all its improvements are discarded once a more ambitious (and therefore risky) line of research yields entirely new methods with orders of magnitude improvement over the old ones. Results based funding (and tenure granting) promotes these more conservative and obvious projects. Proposals for more risky, and therefore potentially more rewarding projects aren’t submitted as no one wants to gamble with their own career.