In any given scientific niche, there is a huge amount of tribal knowledge that never gets written down anywhere, just passed on from one grad student to the rest of the group, and from there spreads by percolation in the tiny niche. And papers are never honest about the performance of the results and what does not work, there is always cherry picking of benchmarks/comparisons etc.

There is absolutely no way you can get these kinds of insights beyond human context capacity that you speak of. The information necessary does not exist in any dataset available to the LLM.