People love to conflate research with development out of "R&D", but the latter is a lot more predictable than the former. Repeatable, well trodden domains are 99,9% of development work out there.
The problem has always been that while the ground is well trod, the path is never clear. There are hundreds of ways to build any one widget, not even counting that the widget you start building isn’t the one they wanted in their head (but not in the spec).
