On a more serious note, I used to puzzle about this when I was in Grad. School. There used to be people whose research I personally (at that time) thought to be

On a more serious note, I used to puzzle about this when I was in Grad. School. There used to be people whose research I personally (at that time) thought to be trivial and used to think it was unfair that they were publishing papers and stuff. I recall what a mentor told me at that time: 99% of research is garbage but this is what we find post factum. We do it anyways so as to be able to take the 1% which drives progress. Also, the nature of cutting edge research is that progress goes slowly, which means that polished results from say 50 years ago are going to look amazing. As I went deeper into research, I was able to appreciate this more: There are things we do, ideas we derive that help us make things more rigorous but sometimes we have to explore other less thought off avenues.