The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the time.
I don't think it's wise to speculate at this point on what problems are "actually easy" or "actually hard", or how long it'll take to achieve certain milestones. I don't think that even the people at the forefront of this research have any way of knowing for sure.
For some projects, 180% would have been an improvement. I've even had a few projects take ~500% of the time. Arguably I should have cut my losses sooner, but I wasn't very good at recognizing the sunk cost fallacy back then.
We also mustn't underestimate the extent in which the human brain is a fuzzy ensemble of partial experts, and composes the first few salient answers provided rather than trying to find a "best" answer that would be too late. Or how often the human brain creates post hoc rationalizations simply to provide narrative continuity.