80% of the work of building the product is the grind.

20% is the fun open-ended research.

When you're in a big open ended domain it's possible to do the fun part the entire time.

But only if you do the grind do you get to where you need to be.

If the grind work is invisible to you, you'll think "we're one week out" from the breakthrough forever.

The research stuff gives the feeling of insight without seeing if it actually works in practice for real use cases.