It does: for example, as djaque's comment points out, in their case this was published at conference proceeding. And of course advice can be sought in private as well.
Yes, exactly. I also gave an invited talk about it at the largest domestic conference in my field. This is kind of unusual for a grad. student which should give you an idea of how unique the problem is. We actually received good advice about our experiment that we might try later. The issue is just how niche what I study is. There's probably less than 10 experts in the world on the specific problem I was tackling.