I would have been much less intimidated by some of these if, at the time I learned them, I had realized (or had been told!) they were only such recent inventions. I've always been very put down by thinking I was only learning the basic stuff and still had a lot of math to go before being able to do interesting stuff that hadn't been done already. As it turns out, what I learned in signal processing was pretty much state of the art and I could have started to think of new applications right away :/