[CrazyStat]

I can confirm the GP matches my experience in academia (PhD, published a paper based on my dissertation, left academia shortly after).

There is immense pressure for early career researchers to work on low-hanging fruit that will give easy guaranteed publications: make a minor change to previous work and write a paper about it; write a paper about what other people wrote papers about (either a review or a meta-analysis); etc. etc. This is how you rack up publications for your tenure review. It's also how you rack up publications to get funding.

Once you have tenure you have a bit more freedom, but you still need to worry about funding (generally). And by that time you've been in the habit of grabbing the lowest-hanging fruit for 1-1.5 decades, assuming you were ~well trained~ in graduate school. After so long reinforcing that habit it becomes hard and scary to build a ladder and go after the better, higher fruit.

[rscho]

Habit is not the problem. Once you get tenure, a good part of your job is to ensure that the younger generation in your lab/uni publishes well, i.e encourage them to pursue the next low-hanging fruit... So no, you do not in fact have more freedom.

[CrazyStat]

That's a fair point. I jumped ship before I got that far, obviously. From my perspective as a student it looked a lot like habit on the part of the senior/tenured people in the department, but I should not have been so quick to assert that.