Heliocentrism was well known, the issue was that the copernican model was a bad model for the evidence and knowledge of physics available at the time (it was basically equivilent to a geocentric model but less need more epicycles, not less, and also required that the earth rotated and some unusual properties for stars). It took Kepler figuring out ellipses and slowly beating out epicycles as a way to do the math, as well as some other experiments which established the world did indeed rotate (not for lack of trying by heliocentricism advocates, but it's a hard measurement to make), to bring the idea mainstream. (And arguably only Newton's laws of motion actually tied it all together)

I'm being picky here, but I don't think you portray an fair view of Kuhn's epistemology here.

Kuhn does not define a value-scale of both methods, on the contrary, he merely introduces the concept of different researchs: one being critical (developing new paradigms) and one being accumulating (further refining existing paradigms).

He also hints to the almost inevitably organic interactions between the two, such that critical research naturally evolves from a pragmatic need to express things simply from a new paradigm when the old one becomes too clumsy for a use case.

This is what happened in your example as well. Copernic (and later Galileo) did not invent heliocentrism out of the blue, the theory around it existed since antic Greece. It is even arguably the Renaissance, leading metaphysicists to revisit ancien texts, that spurred the idea to Copernic to consider it. But ultimately the need for the new paradigm was pushed by the need to revisit the calendar, which was drifting, and the difficulty to do it in a geocentric world, where you have to take planet retrocession into account.

Having just finally read (well, listened to) Kuhn's book, I can say:

(a) I wouldn't quite characterize the book as being "about this theory" — it's a bit more nuanced. He definitely says that it's usually younger scientists with less invested in the currently reigning theory that are most likely to push forward a revolution. However, I don't recall any examples in the book of people who where wholly _unaware_ of the previous theory.

(b) You should absolutely, definitely read it. It's a classic for a reason, and the writing style is a delight.

About geocentrism vs heliocentrism, 3blue1brown has recently released a video [1] that talks about about it. It is about the cosmic distance ladder, but geocentrism is mentioned, and it makes a lot of sense in context.

To summarize: heliocentrism was known to the ancient Greeks, who realized the Sun was much bigger than the Earth, so it would seem logical to have the Earth go around the sun. But the counterargument was that if the Earth goes around the Sun, the stars should move relative to each other during the year, because of parallax, and they didn't have instruments that were precise enough to see it, so they assumed that they didn't. Copernicus major contribution wasn't heliocentrism, but the orbital periods of planets. And the model wasn't complete until Kepler calculated the shapes of the orbits. For details, watch the video, it is really good.

[1] https://youtu.be/YdOXS_9_P4U