Comment by AndrewKemendo

The majority of PhD candidates deal with this because the point of a PhD is to prove you can to “normal science” [1] which boils down to “how do I make this system go from 1% observable to 1.001% observable” which is just a gate for being in the academic career field.

You’ll almost never see a PhD thesis that has anything particularly interesting, novel or directly applicable to the sciences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science