There's something like this as well in academia or at least science: because only successful studies get published (the file drawer problem), it's easy for someone who's read a lot of papers but not gotten their hands dirty yet to think that a technique is much easier and less failure prone than it actually is. Of course it's necessary to try new things and every so often they succeed, but if there are 50 papers on some system and none of them have been able to answer a question that seems obviously important, there's probably a reason why. I realized this too late and am now dealing with the consequences as a senior grad student.