Its amazing to me when people talk about recombining things, or following up on things as somehow lesser work.
People can't separate the perspective they were given when they learned the concepts, that those who developed the concepts didn't have because they didn't exist.
Simple things are hard, or everything simple would have been done hundreds of years ago, and that is certainly not the case. Seeing something others have not noticed is very hard, when we don't have the concepts that the "invisible" things right in front of us will teach us.