> that will instantly 10x or 100x current capabilities.

In the 1920s we had legions of very smart, highly trained (arguably better trained in mathematics) basically chucking relays and vacuum tubes together with reckless abandon to build the most valuable and complicated systems mankind had ever come up with (telephony, radio, radar, etc). They had no idea how they worked and only ad-hoc rules of thumb to construct them.

It took the insight of a handful of these people both in and outside of industry to formalize the theory of operation of most of what people were already building and then use that theory to establish formal design practices.

The people before these theories were realized were exceptionally smart and good at what they did, it's just they didn't have better design tools to reason about the things they were building.

And once they had those tools they didn't 10x or 100x overnight.