Heuristics and common sense intuition are quite obviously not the same thing.

You don't have to posit that scientific breakthroughs come from hunches, you can actually cite examples from books or Wikipedia :D. There are plenty! Again, that has nothing to do with whether or not a given scientific breakthrough is based on common sense intuition.

Your point about interior experience not being empirically measurable is an interesting though, but again, has no bearing on whether or not scientific breakthroughs come about as the result of common sense intuition.