Isaac Newton is regarded as a genius, but he worked on really basic stuff like calculus and Newtonian mechanics. Of course it was harder, when he and his competitors were inventing it.

Sure, we handle more complex stuff now. But modern highschool material used to be really complex. Eventually theory, frameworks, language, and pedagogy, develop around a field that make it look deceptively simple. That’s still incrementalism but incrementation comes from the next generation that grew up in an environment where our discoveries are table stakes.

Is it possible that you no longer live in a simple world, because you’ve become an expert, and moved on from ingesting the refined model from the previous generation, to either applying the current unrefined model to the hardest problems it can handle, or to building the model for the next generation?