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Is it a very universal experience to find it easier to write up your views if it's in response to someone else's writeup? Seems like the kind of thing that could explain a lot about how research tends to happen if it were a pretty universal experience.
new galaxy brain hypothesis of how research advances: progress happens when people feel unhappy about a bad but popular paper and want to prove it wrong (or when they feel like they can do even better than someone else)
this explains:
* why it's often necessary to have bad incremental papers that don't introduce any generalizable techniques (nobody will care about the followup until it's refuting the bad paper)
* why so much of academia exists to argue that other academics are wrong and bad
* why academics sometimes act like things don't exist unless there's a paper about them, even though the thing is really obvious