This is the what really matters here IMHO:

“It’s not just that the top hypothesis they provide was the right one,” he said.

"It’s that they provide another four, and all of them made sense.

“And for one of them, we never thought about it, and we’re now working on that.”

Plausible hypothesis generation is really helpful and if it hadn’t even occured to them it either means it came from someone else’s work that they had been unable to understand, distill or anticipate from their own knowledge of what others are doing in the field or that it is actually novel (in the way that all science is small progress building on the blocks of others).

Either way hypothesis generation saves a lot of time and gave their lab a new idea.

I have a general philosophy of reinstalling my systems from scratch every few months and honestly Ubuntu is among the easiest for that (Debian is close second, but corporate overlords freak the hell out)