Ivy League research: never publish the simpler thing?

In the introduccion to some QFT book, Zee says that he was suggested not to publish any lecture notes until tenure. Obvious interpretation is that it was about being valuable enough to get a contract, but perhaps it is also a sort of meta training: if you publish the simpler, easy to grasp format, you are giving the advantage. Better if you wait to publish a complicated result.

This week I went to think about the simpler, easy to grasp limits of Kaluza Klein theory. The cases where you avoid the tower of states, either because they are hidden in some sophisticated algebra, or more trivially because you got to put the compactification volume down to zero, while keeping the coupling constant at a finite value.

The guiding idea is clear, as the coupling constant depends on the general gravitational constant and on the radius of the compact dimensions, you can get a gauge QFT without the tower if you take the same opportunity to kill gravity. Which is something you want to do, as QFT gauge theory is expected to be renormalizable.

Now, it seems that this machinery is the inspiration of Geometric Engineering and rigid limits of string theory.