Comment by bonoboTP
Yes, I'm not trying to disparage it too much, it's just the reality of the job. But I found that even junior PhD students can have a romantic illusion that real scientists just spend their time musing and thinking and sometimes they have a flash of insight which they then enthusiastically share with the others. But the more mundane reality is that papers are projects with their own life cycle. You have to be on time, you have to cater to where "the discourse" is right now, the metagame. But to be fast, you need a process, a formula. It's sales. Everything can be approached from a sales and marketing mentality and it tends to bring success to a scary degree. Some apply similar tools in their romantic lives too, where optimizing your dating profile is just the start. I tend to think this is not the real path to something fulfilling, but pursuing this question veers into religious territory.
I've even had this discussion with people in at least adjacent roles to mine. We could put together ten very serviceable conference submittals tomorrow that we could spend a week turning into very competent conference presentations within a week. They wouldn't be brilliant but they'd be "good" relative to the norm. It's just one of the things we can crank out like we crank out blogs/columns.