I actually work on problems that haven't been solved previously (or why not just get a dev to do it rather than a researcher). I get offended when some dev who writes web apps connecting to databases all the time says "all code should be simple." They really don't have a clue.
At what point is simple simple enough? You can simplify for a long time just by working at the same problem for a few years. But wow...not everything is a basic crud app.
Of course, this sometimes happens, but it shouldn't be encouraged. This way you are creating technical debt, which will be very expensive to pay off.