> (University) Education sublely teaches us that the only important problems are those that are very difficult and preferably have never been solved before. Those same problems also make for better blogposts. In the real world the incentives are mostly opposite. Problems with no known solutions (or only really difficult solutions) are generally bad.

This is a great insight. One can add value to other people's lives by applying known solutions in relatively novel contexts (e.g. building a CRUD form at XYZ employer), whereas it's very hard to add value to other people's lives by trying to develop entirely novel solutions (because the probability of success is so low). Most of our training however, focuses on the methodology used to develop these novel solutions, rather than on the application of the solutions themselves.