Keep in mind that generally I advocate "Explore multiple approaches simultaneously" and "Trust your intuitions, but don't waste too much time arguing for them".

Fair enough!

(Re your last paragraph, it sounds like we're in pretty perfect agreement about the usefulness of previous research. I suppose that upthread, you were saying "these people were following a streetlight/shadow strategy and it didn't actually work" and I was saying "retrospectively, it looks like the correct strategy would have been to first explore some anthropic problems and then try to find a common answer to all of them, which sounds like it can be described as starting under the streetlight, then moving into the shadows". So it sounds like we agree about the actual subject matter and any apparent disagreement is either due to talking about different things or due to disagreement about how to best apply the metaphor to the example, so it looks like there's nothing that would actually be useful to debate. Cool! :-))