It has very little to do with credential creep. The problem is that, in order to do work at the frontier of a field, you first have to get to the frontier - you have to learn what's going on there, which means that you have to learn all the stuff you have to learn in order to actually understand what's going on there. The learning to actually understand enough to get to the frontier is taking longer and longer. That's not credential creep, that's creep in how far away the frontier is from the foundations.

That sounds like an abstraction problem. I’m totally willing to accept I’m crazy. But my gut feeling is there is a lot of technical debt in representation, so it’s hard to move to the frontier.

In this case, you're probably just wrong. Consider for half a second how many programmers fail Fizz Buzz, and then think about how much work it takes to get from that to the frontier of computational science (i.e. not just installing another javascript library, but actually computation).

There's a lot of low hanging fruit out there, but you still have to actually know how to find it.

I want to point out that Maxwell had like 40+ equations for electricity that wound up being 4. I suspect that many fields have rules, but those rules aren't the most concise representation.

it will always be hard to get to the frontier. but that path should be easy. we can get years and years of explorers by building good roads.

Regardless, will written undifferentiated paper is way better than a paper mill and badly written or worse, lying paper. These happen all the time in algorithms.

Cannot even rely on citation indeed as it is a common practice to cite papers from your surroundings without quality control. Or barely on topic.

This is the opposite of credential creep ... the mathematicians with the credentials were really open minded and excited that someone from the "outside" had a solution! They didn't give a rip about the math pedigree.

That's because CompSci and mathematics is definite. It doesn't matter if someone has PhD's up the wazoo, or didn't finish high school. If the theorem solves something, and it has a proof that shows it, it's accepted.

Other sciences are much more "soft" and have error bars and such. Someone with a "lesser pedigree" just couldn't cope with the special sciences. Nor could they afford the lab.