Yep, people are really forgetting that most of the time it's just being clever rather than having (or using) in-depth knowledge is what allows to bring some good solution to the table.

An example from today: we have a very slow pattern matching code, that starts to be a bottleneck for the application. What can you consider? Well you can dive into sexy bloom filters, experiment with some Trie-based structures. But then when you analyse the problem it results that simple word lookup with a simple hashtable is the fastest solution for given constraints. No big deal, no rocket science.

Probably the same goes for rocket scientists, but one level higher ;)