/because enough of the right minds have not been looking at it as a puzzle worth solving, possibly because it and other AI related concepts are often introduced at or just before the PhD level and so most minds in science never encounter it/

Well, there was a good fifty plus years of linguists without access to good statistical methods who also failed to solve the problems as well... And they also didn't come up with the kinda functional answers that we now have from statistical methods, which are now able to do crazy things like translate reasonably well between nearly arbitrary language pairs.

Your statement sounds like a theoretician's sour grapes...