This seems to be a typical case of the following scenario: You have been working on a topic for a while. Then, one day, you learn that someone has managed to g

This seems to be a typical case of the following scenario: You have been working on a topic for a while. Then, one day, you learn that someone has managed to get a paper on the topic into Nature/Science/whatever. And not because their results are that impressive but because they are from a famous institute and are using fashionable methods. Of course, the first thing you do is checking if you can improve the results with the tools you already have. If you can, you post the results online and start working on a paper. That happens all the time.