Not sure why you think a computer screen is giving you snark, but you do you.

> I'm not an expert

You read through all of that data and research, as told earlier, and haven't become an expert...? Yeah right. No need to be so modest with me. Be proud of your achievements!

> Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status.

It may be, but no need to waste time sauntering off on another, rather uninteresting, subject. We're talking about R&D, not academic achievement. Stay focused, by friend.

> Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.

R&D is the leisure activity of many people. We'll leave your data sources to quantify exactly what that means, but it is clearly large enough to be a recognizable set of the population.

> Research is generally a race

It can be where you are trying to be first to build a moat around something that scales massively. But not all R&D scales, or even wants to scale. Despite your unquantified "generally" claim, it remains unclear if most R&D is even trying to scale. There are a lot of hobbyists out there carrying out R&D with no plans for it beyond doing something for themselves.

> there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.

There is seemingly no end to how much R&D is possible. I guess at some point there is a pinnacle of human achievement, but it seems highly unlikely that we'll reach that point in the next thousand years. Humans are pretty shortsighted — the people from the year 1200 would have never imagined digital computers being a thing — but when the time comes we always find something new to immerse our thoughts in.

So what if someone is smarter and harder working?