This sounds like a romanticization of creativity. Fundamentally discovery could be described as looking for gaps in our observation and then attempting to fill

This sounds like a romanticization of creativity. Fundamentally discovery could be described as looking for gaps in our observation and then attempting to fill in those gaps with more observation and analysis. The age of low hanging fruit shower thought inventions draws to a close when every field requires 10-20+ years of study to approach a reasonable knowledge of it. "Sparks" of creativity, as you say, are just based upon memories and experience. This isn't something special, its an emergent property of retaining knowledge and having thought. There is no reason to think AI is incapable of hypothesizing and then following up on those. Every AI can be immediately imparted with all expert human knowledge across all fields. Their threshold for creativity is far beyond ours, once tamed.