[matthewdgreen]

It's a little more complicated than that. If all you're interested in disovery, you can wander off into rabbit holes or disappear into areas that are only interesting to you. Publishability is useful because it gives you useful external feedback into whether a community thinks what you're doing is "worth discovering". Like any metric, you can find yourself gaming it (intentionally or unintentionally) and it has a slew of other failure modes. Still, you can prize discovery and also care about what other people think.