I would literally pay to subscribe to a comments feed on posts like this. It's so obvious and so powerful, I'm sitting here kicking myself for not thinking of it first.

Nearly every time I've put in a successful patent, that last bit ("god damn it! Why didn't I think of that?") comes up. The other times are derived from clinical trials in rare populations (whereupon other trialists say "god damn it! Why didn't I think of measuring that?").

The idea being, look for simple ideas like this, jump into the market second, and split the market for a while. Then when it gets too crowded, jump to the next-best-idea in the queue. Could be very profitable in this big ML transition.