Somewhat related anecdote: I’m reminded of a good friend who is preeminent in their field. No one would know them outside of their area of expertise, but anyone within that area of expertise (or who has learned that area of expertise from their college textbooks) knows their name. I got dinner with them over the holidays last year and they lamented that, I’m guessing based on name recognition, they receive a steady stream of communications (letters, email, etc) from laypeople who always think they have done something amazing previously thought impossible, or they have a new insight that everyone else ever has missed. Invariably my friend no longer spends time going through these because in every single of the hundreds of comms they’ve read, there’s always some confound factor or something basic the writer missed that invalidates everything. I am not an academic, but my impression is that while laypeople like you and me can brute force things and have amazing insights, mostly we’re just wrong for some reason that a trained scientist or academic would have spotted immediately.