But I'm not sure I'd recommend going into the field. There's something demoralizing about doing research on something which already has dozens of valid and successful methods, of which you are trying to create a slightly more optimized version.
But that "slightly more optimized version" may mean "one that does not quietly produce disastrously incorrect results for some input values".
What I was trying to say was that as a graduate student you might be given a problem that already has many really good and smart solutions and be essentially told to find a better solution than all of these. How this goes will depend a lot on the specific problem, your advisor, etc.
If you ever get a PhD, you'll find that this is pretty much all of academia.