[macksd]

I think the point of the person to whom you're replying is that it being solved doesn't mean it was as easy as it now looks. When we see it done and we see the methods are not all that novel, we are biased to think that. But the fact that it was not more complete until then and was a subject of fascination for many actually implies the opposite. We're looking at an incredibly rare event and asking why a few specific investigators couldn't have achieved that decades ago.

The "decades ago" caveat is especially key, because they used a computer system with raw performance well within an order of magnitude of today's Top500 supercomputers. I like to point out government incompetence too, but spending that kind of resources banging away at a message from a killer we don't believe has been active for several decades isn't exactly a prudent move.