You indeed have a very good point which I had forgotten about. The literature search is a tremendous amount of work. I'm still confused three years into grad

You indeed have a very good point which I had forgotten about. The literature search is a tremendous amount of work. I'm still confused three years into grad school why some articles make it into top journals and others do not. It mostly seems to come down to how novel and important the work is; not how "difficult" the work is to perform. I saw something in Nature the other day, and my first reaction was "Seriously? I could program that in a weekend." But then I began researching the topic and figured out no work had ever been done in that area before, and the result was really surprising and counterintuitive. The reason it was in Nature wasn't because the project was a lot of work; it was because it was a great idea that no one had thought of. And it does seem like every new idea I think of has already been done in some form when I start searching for it. I thought I had discovered a new kind of interaction between hydrogen and lithium the other day. I did a search for articles between year 2000 and now -- nothing came up. I was really excited until I lowered the starting search year to 1980 and discovered the entire concept had already been exhaustively researched in the early 90s, and now there's not much more to say about it. So yes, you're right; that would be difficult for a high school student.