I wonder if this focus on tackling hard problems - problems which had the potential to end up being downright unsolvable and a waste of time - might have been facilitated by the fact that he was a clerk in a patent office and had, so to speak, nothing to lose. If he had wasted 8 years, so what? It would not have made his situation any worse.
Whereas an acknowledged figure in the academia needs to defend status and name and function. So they are perhaps less motivated to deal with bet-the-farm ideas.
Exactly right. Einstein had no disincentive from taking on the hardest problems, since he had no responsibility to show results.
On the other hand, Einstein had no direct incentive to work on physics at all. He had a restless mind, and was in some ways fortunate to be thinking compulsively about the right problems at the right time.
Whereas an acknowledged figure in the academia needs to defend status and name and function. So they are perhaps less motivated to deal with bet-the-farm ideas.