There's always a lot of research that is "expected", but there's nothing wrong with that. The two most common reasons this happens are: 1. Well somebody has

There's always a lot of research that is "expected", but there's nothing wrong with that. The two most common reasons this happens are: 1. Well somebody has got to do the work and we can't all just go around assuming stuff, even if we're pretty confident. The confirmation helps and is beneficial to the community. 2. It's obvious post hoc and you have gaslit yourself into thinking that you already knew it because you kinda knew it at a high level and you only read the result at a high level too so you entirely miss all the actual details and all the context (especially since there is so much context that never makes it into a paper[0]) 3. (bonus) It addresses the same thing that someone else addressed but from a different approach and the new approach can provide additional insight. Either way, it is beneficial to the community. Sure, nothing is groundbreaking but that's how science is. 99% incremental steps. And hey, these days most ML papers are just an active demonstration of how well you can brute force search optimal hyperparameters (i.e. how much compute you can afford). I see far fewer sufficiently isolating variables and actually provide strong evidence of the things claimed as novel, not recognizing that benchmark results are far from sufficient. But I blame reviewers for that, but also see rant in [0] [0] I think the hardest thing about beginning a PhD is that you're reading a bunch of papers going like "why the fuck are they doing this?" and the problem is that you don't have enough breadth or depth to get it. You don't understand the decades long conversation of how we got here and what problems were being addressed along the way. To be fair, a lot of this is never stated explicitly and so you annoyingly have to piece everything together by reading a few hundred papers. But also, good luck providing all that context within page limits and besides, papers are written for /peers/, by which I mean niche peers, not domain peers. Ain't nobody got time to write textbooks, because you're just trying to publish so you don't perish and you're already exhausted from all the grant writing, rebuttals, bureaucratic work, and all that fun jazz.