It's a shame that completing a mountain of well-defined, but tedious work with little independent thought is considered an original contribution to the field.
Well of course it isn't, and you won't see any job openings saying 'looking for a 4 year slave'. And you generally hire people expecting them to be capable of working independently. But sometimes it doesn't turn out that way, and instead of losing years of work and effort, things just turn out a certain way.