This article has been deeply influential for me: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

I used to imagine for someone in construction a wall must be some really simple thing. But it's only simple after millennia of building walls. So I now have lots of grace and patience for humanity to figure out numbers in computers, whether integers or reals.

Your explanation is possibly the same just in different words. It's a hard problem and probably needs a whole lifetime. But it's in no single person's economic interest to devote to it the time it needs (not to mention the diverse skills required; once one has a solution one has to pitch it to the world). And so it will happen over a hundred lifetimes.