Punctuated equilibrium theory.

This is actually a lazy approach as you describe it. Instead, what is needed is an elegant and simple approach that is 99% of the way there out of the gate. Soon as you start doing statistical tweaking and overfitting models, you are not approaching a solution.

In a way yes. For models in physics that should make you suspicious, since most of our famous and useful models found are simple and accurate. However, in general intelligence or even multimodal pattern matching there’s no guarantee there’s an elegant architecture at the core. Elegant models in social sciences like economics, sociology and even fields like biology tend to be hilariously off.

It's been described as fumbling around in a dark room until you find the light switch. At which point you can see the doorway leading to the next dark room.

That is how science seems to work as a whole. What worries me is that the market views the emergence of additional productive paradigm shifts in AI as only a matter of money. A normal scientific advancement plateau for another five years in AI would be a short-term disaster for the stock market and economy.