Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits is extremely leaky, so you often learn to ignore it unless you absolutely need to pay attention.
Hobbyist and undergrad projects thus usually consist of cargo culting combinations of simple circuit building blocks connected to a microcontroller of some kind. A lot of research (not in EE) needs this kind of work, but it's not necessarily glamorous. This is the same as pulling software libraries off the shelf to do software work ("showing my advisor docker"), but the software work gets more credit in modern academia because the skills are rarer and the building blocks are newer.
Plenty of cutting-edge science needs hobbyist-level EE, it's just not work in EE. Actual CS research is largely the same as EE research: very, very heavy on math and very difficult to do without studying a lot. If you compare hard EE research to basic software engineering, it makes sense that you think there's a "wall," but you're ignoring the easy EE and the hard CS.