Is combinatorial novelty without insight useful? Who cares if we're the first to use tool T on problem P? I'm a bioinformatician and former student of applied math. I want help to see if I should change my view).

Many academics, including all of my PI's on my major projects, justify their work by saying "We're the first ones to apply fashionable technique T on problem P". This is in situations where P is often well-studied and T was developed and established by other groups. I call it "combinatorial novelty" in the title because the novelty is not in new tools, nor new insights, but rather in new combinations. The justification is essentially "We're early adopters." 

This would be fine if the studies produced valuable new insight about P. P is important and I'd be proud to make progress on it whether or not I'm using fancy new techniques like T. But usually, our progress on P is weak despite using T, so we need to turn to T's fanciness to justify our work. I see people using this "combinatorial novelty" to make their work seem like a big deal.

This seems flimsy, but if every PI I've worked under is doing it, then either it impresses grant reviewers, or it actually is valuable to science and I just don't understand why. Or both. Is this valuable to science? If so, why?
Is this valuable to science? If so, why?


Because it leads us to understand if tool T works on problem B. How big the "insight" that we gain from this is depends a lot on how different T is to other tools that have already been used on B, or, conversely, how different B is from other problems that T has been applied to.

The range here goes from "it is mind-blowing that T could work on B" all the way to "meh, everybody knew that T would work because we use it all the time for B' anyway" - although I will grant that most works following this schema in practice end up more on the rather incremental side of things.