This isn't a useful analogy. His point is that the millenium problems should be treated as interesting goals where the journey is the purpose and where the end

This isn't a useful analogy. His point is that the millenium problems should be treated as interesting goals where the journey is the purpose and where the end doesn't matter so much. We don't care about having an incomprehensible solution to the NS so much as having an elegant solution after many of subfields of math are built up in order to obtain that elegant solution.