Honestly, this happens in a lot of fields, including programming. I often wonder why we spend so much time trying to justify certain research avenues over others and don't let people just research what they find is interesting. I hear you, we should be efficient and not waste money. But is there actually good evidence that we have strong predictive powers here? There's at least strong evidence that dark horses are quite common in the innovation space and exceptionally common in major breakthroughs. So even if we want to primarily focus on funding promising directions there is still good evidence that optimal funding requires funding unpopular ideas.

Which if we think about a lot of this, it should make sense anyways. Just by thinking about optimization theory. It is often quite good to add noise so that your optimization function can escape local minima. We can only travel directly to the global optima if we know exactly where it is. But should we not expect that expert predictive power is much better at pointing to local optima rather than global? (global very likely doesn't exist but that doesn't mean there aren't better optima).

There's also many famous scientists that didn't "spend much time working." I add quotes, because if you're a researcher you'd naturally understand there's no real thing as "not working." There is only active work and inactive work. You're likely consumed by the topics and problems you're trying to solve. So doing things like going on walks, playing your favorite sport, or whatever ends up being beneficial as you can relax and shift between focused and creative modes. But that doesn't happen as much if your boss thinks "working" is staring at the chalkboard. Sometimes it is best to go sit outside and daydream, while other times it is best to hammer your head against that metaphorical chalkboard.

  > I don't have that type of patience.

As for this, patience is a skill. Delayed rewards. Long term rewards are often noisier and more difficult to attribute to their appropriate causes. Even if the long term rewards are substantially greater than the short term, and the timeframe isn't too large, most people prefer the short term. Not just because reward, but because interpretability. As an example, just think about education in of itself. Lots of effort but also lots of reward. Even though the process is very noisy and it is unclear which aspects of education contributed the most to success, it is very clear that there's a strong connection between education and success (does not mean there aren't other pathways to success nor that you are guaranteed to be successful by being educated. It can be easy to conflate these things).