"This seems like the most important question in the universe, and one not nearly studied enough."
If anything, I think the opposite is true. We study it far more than we actually should in some sense, relative to the tools we have.
Bear with me, this is going to seem a strange diversion: One of the biggest problems in particle physics is that the smallest possible tools we can use to examine the universe, like quarks, electrons, photons, etc. are all radically larger than what seems to be the smallest size of the universe itself. Compared to the Planck length, all of those things are enormous. I liken it to trying to determine whether a planet has life on it, when your only tool is the ability to smash other planets into it, and examine the resulting blobs six months later, from a distance so great they're just dots in your telescope. It's really hard to determine how the universe works at such small scales when your smallest tools are orders of magnitude too big.
We have the opposite problem with consciousness research. We have tools that can measure a neuron somewhat. Honestly, we're not even all that great at that. (We can measure voltages fairly well, but our visibility into the deep biochemistry is very weak. Honestly even a single neuron is beyond us in some non-trivial ways.) We have some tools that can take extremely broad averages across massive chunks of neurons. Meanwhile, we have every reason to believe that whatever consciousness is, it lies a good ten+ orders of magnitude above that (we can see this from the fact that it seems to require a human brain to be human conscious, and even the animals that appear to possess a lot of it like dolphins and birds still have brains far, far beyond anything we can treat quantitatively). We're ants trying to determine the nature of the entire planet we're sitting on, and the tools we've got to investigate it are that we can move these grains from here to there.
Occasionally ants get up on their tiny little soap boxes and declare "Damn it, it just shouldn't be that hard to understand our planet with these tools!" Sometimes they declare "It's obviously just all topsoil!" or other equally silly things. It doesn't particularly help; it just shows the smallness of the ant in question.