Most useful software engineering work is doing fairly simple things and the numbers of people doing this work reflects that.

> those of us who have had to solve open problems with no solution written somewhere because there is none.

Probably because solving said 'truly hard problem' is niche with little or limited value as few people have tried to solve it (otherwise a solutions will likely have been written).

Darn, hopefully curing cancer becomes less niche so we can solve it ;)

To be less tongue-in-cheek, your logic is flawed. We simply have too many hard problems than we do smart people, unfortunately.

And the ones we do have seem to like optimizing comfort over risk, such as taking cush consultancy positions.