There's no law of nature saying you can't get good results while viewing yourself as an amateur light-headed butterfly. In fact, I think it helps!

You have to work on systematically developing mastery though. Difficult problems (especially the ones without clear problem statements) require thousands of hours of background-building and familiarizing yourself with the problem to make steps in the right directions, even where these steps appear obvious and easy in retrospect, and where specific subproblems can be resolved easily without having that background. You need to be able to ask the right questions, not only to answer them.

It doesn't seem natural to describe such work as an act of "amateur light-headed butterfly". Butterflies don't work in coal mines.