Yes deep deep rabbit hole. I saw someone do something similar once and forget to solve the original problem they were trying to solve which was to make money. Fortunately he was bailed out by "rich daddy" and I continued to mug them for contract fees for another 6 months . The task in question was I suppose a very early version of Uber's routing stuff targeted at goods movement. The rabbit hole was hyper-optimisation of a working serendipitous discovery algorithm rather than marketing it properly
Many years ago when I was working at Reed Corrugated Cases (doing support) I wandered into the the developer's pit for a "pass the time of day" chat. Turns out I'd walked in on the chief programmer and one of his minions right at the point where they'd started tearing their hair out over a problem that they'd been working on for weeks. They were trying to produce optimum loads for our delivery lorries, both in terms of packing everything optimally into the lorry and having it available in the right order to take the optimum delivery route. I had to point out that "
optimum packing and depletion*" and "
the travelling salesman problem" are two of the hardest problems known to computer science and had eluded the greatest minds in the field for years, and they were trying to solve them both simultaneously. They didn't know whether to thank me for offering a graceful way out of the pit they had dug for themselves, or curse me for not clairvoyantly telling them so weeks earlier.
* I told then that, from memory, "
optimum packing and depletion" was actually computationally undecidable, and then had to go on and try to explain the
Entscheidungsproblem to guys who were bright**, but didn't have the background to really quickly grasp it all, and I'm
not the best man to ask to explain it.
** But not that bright, the Chief Programmer had deliberately chosen an Austin Allegro as his company car.