Anything that takes work required some form of motivation. It is very likely that the person that did the thing you think to be wrongheaded was a lot more like you than different from you.

The times when experience gets in the way is when the reasons for decisions are no longer true, but you fail to revisit those decisions. My favorite example for this is the Jet engine:

Radial-flow compressors create far too much drag to create efficient engines. Axial flow compressors generate too little compression in each stage to create lightweight engines. Therefore jet engines are not practicable.

The above paragraph was true around 1930. Improvements in metallurgy, machining, and compressor design eventually made axial-flow compressors much lighter and more efficient. I can easily imagine a more experienced engineer telling a less experienced one something like "I looked into that and the math just doesn't work out."

One can't fault the more experience engineer because one doesn't have time to reexamine all of the underpinnings for all of the knowledge one has about the world on a regular basis. Though I do recall hearing a few people (including Feynman) who would keep a journal of problems they failed to solve. Any time they would learn a new technique or about a new technology they would flip through and see if there was anything in it that could be solved with the new information.