Comment by nostrademons

I thought that the point the grandparent is highlighting is that "important work" is not defined by what other people think is important, but by the fact that you have a unique angle of attack that suddenly makes a previously-unsolved problem tractable. Einstein had a unique angle of attack for all 4 of his annus mirabilis papers, and the photoelectric effect, Michelson-Morley, and Brownian motion were all known to be important unsolved paradoxes in the physics of the day.