> This is missing my pet step: doing the literature review.
One of the earliest, most important, and most useful lessons I learned from a senior grad student: "a day in the library can be worth a week at the bench."
Or this: you spend 4 months on a project and belatedly notice schmidhuber proved a much better result in 1985 and yells at you and you get kicked out of academia
You don't get kicked out of academia for that... Well maybe if you're a student and you lose your funding. It's really embarrassing and I'm sure frustrating too. I've reviewed a couple of papers where they didn't do their literature review, there were lots of obvious (to people who read) prior work, and I've had to straight reject their papers. I feel bad for them but do your literature review folks!