I don't consider Carmack to be an expert on creativity, of all things.
His game ideas can be summarized thusly: DOOM.
The best id game, the original Quake, had both John Romero and American McGee as designers, among others, AND Trent Reznor on sound effects.
Without them, id did... DOOM 3.
What Carmack is really referring to is the gruntwork of things like writing multiple rendering pipelines to support the nightmare hodgepodge of consumer 3D hardware, trying out WELL-KNOWN rendering techniques (invented for film) in games as hardware improves, and so forth, which sometimes is just tedium and sometimes requires hackery like fast stencil shadows/sqrt/bit-twiddling tricks. Trying a bunch of methods to see what works on limited hardware is a process of discovery.
You cannot brute-force creative ideas in general in that manner.
He is an expert on creative problem solving. I doubt you are in a position to dispute that. And how long do you think consumer 3D hardware has been mainstream? Carmack's career spans a lot longer than that.
I wonder if you would accuse an artist who spends lots of time exploring dead end ideas of doing grunt work? Would you dismiss an artist as adapting WELL-KNOWN ideas if they allowed you to view someone else's work in a brand new, unexpected light?
His game ideas can be summarized thusly: DOOM.
The best id game, the original Quake, had both John Romero and American McGee as designers, among others, AND Trent Reznor on sound effects.
Without them, id did... DOOM 3.
What Carmack is really referring to is the gruntwork of things like writing multiple rendering pipelines to support the nightmare hodgepodge of consumer 3D hardware, trying out WELL-KNOWN rendering techniques (invented for film) in games as hardware improves, and so forth, which sometimes is just tedium and sometimes requires hackery like fast stencil shadows/sqrt/bit-twiddling tricks. Trying a bunch of methods to see what works on limited hardware is a process of discovery.
You cannot brute-force creative ideas in general in that manner.