The vast majority of work is plumbing, but there are still new things.
What matters isn't making new things, it's making new things that work, and bringing them all the way to completion.
The vast majority of innovation isn't exciting discovery, it's coming up with tests to convince yourself you actually did what you thought you did and sharing those results with regulators. That's the difference between Theranos and GRAIL.
I just built a tardigrade detector neural network; nobody has done that exact thing before, and now i'm talking to the world's leading tardigrade researcher because my tool might be helpful in answering an unanswered important tardigrade question.
But thousands if not millions of individuals worked over hundreds to thousands of years to bring us that tardigrade detector; all I did was take advantage of that to label 100 images! I've tried being an ML researcher; my conclusion is the best models are distilled from postdoc tears, and we merely retrain those models without pain.
To briefly clarify on why I believe it is the former: Caleb just happened to have caught a really bad fungal pneumonia when he was 9yo, and that was his inspiration to explore what could be done to diagnose things differently. And he just happened to do tons of research to try and re-use open source technology, etc.
Off topic -> but on topic of the original post. Do you know if https://github.com/ocornut/imgui is available for embedded? It might be too much for the very low end but it for a reasonably capable system it's better than web or some high powered UI like Qt.