My biggest beef with the lean startup philosophy is it seems to encourage engineers away from working on deep, hard problems for a long time.But it doesn't. If the result of working a deep, hard problem is a solution that the world obviously needs, then the LS methodology does not push doing "MVPs" or whatever. So if you're working on a cure for cancer, or a cheap, clean, renewable energy source, you wouldn't be following this model in the first place. The whole "lean startup" / "customer development" approach is meant for dealing with case of extreme uncertainty, and especially in regards to market/customer knowledge.
It's all too easy to release something basic too early, see it inevitably "fail", and decide to "pivot" based upon this.
Anybody who does that doesn't understand the Lean Startup approach, and isn't doing it right. Every change isn't a "pivot" and you don't go pivoting at arbitrary points just because of an isolated bit of negative feedback. The idea is to find a market for the original idea, as conceived, and pivot only if a market cannot be found (or created) for that.
I feel this is often a symptom of a deeper disease: either not having courage in your convictions or not building something that you could see yourself (or someone you know) using regularly. In short: in creative endeavors it is sometimes healthy to have bias in your views based upon intuition and not direct evidence ("I don't care what the A/B test said, we're going with this idea anyway") because sometimes this intuition can lead you down corners that break you out of local minima up to another plateau.
Agreed... there is a place for vision and intuition sometimes. Unfortunately there's no easy way to know when your intuition is actually leading somewhere. It's a battle we all face.