I am totally confused, it is documented in the original south korean paper, why anyone would want to rely on such second hand unverified info when first hand info from the original inventors are freely available to everyone?
Having multiple groups document and share their progress while attempting to replicate LK-99 is exciting and it captures people's imagination. People want to see LK-99 being replicated by multiple sources. Aside from that, as I understand it the information in the original South Korean paper leaves out a lot of details on how to fully replicate their findings.
It is documented fairly poorly in the South Korean paper. Not atrociously poorly, but enough that there's a fair bit of ambiguity, and several top labs have failed to replicate for this reason. When replication is this difficult, hundreds of labs doing experiments will give tremendous data on the principles behind what create the material, moreso than one lab repeating hundreds of small tweaks.
That's one of the core tenets of science of course: experimental reproducibility given reasonable instructions; the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, well except for possibly blackholes
