But the drama here is a little important. Stealing the millennium prize for N-S is sort of a big deal, especially to those who had been working on it for the last few years.
A hundred pages of impenetrable brute forced Lean would advance the field much less than something elegant and human understandable, perhaps relying on some new clever spark of innovation that might inspire new areas of research.
Particularly if the first proof being "solved" thanks to piles of money and compute for self-serving marketing discourages the mathematician who might have otherwise devoted years of focus to reach the superior proof we will now never see.
Obtaining a finite-time blow-up for Navier-Stokes does not necessarily advance the field of mathematics by any significant measure, whether the proof is very long or very short.
As a concrete example, such a proof could be less than a page with very specific initial and boundary conditions and inserting them into the equations to get something that goes to infinity when time goes to some finite value.
This would resolve the Millenium problem but not make humanity any smarter.
Math, like any other human endeavor, doesn't exist until someone is motivated to invent it. The laws of the universe aren't understood until someone is motivated to discover them. So it might be worthwhile to not completely ignore discussion about incentives.
Math is largely performed in collaboration. Collaboration requires trust. If people like you had their way, we would lose trust, therefore collaboration, and therefore progress.
So if math is all that matters to you, you should care about this.
Boosters have posited this conjecture since the beginning: “who cares how a proof comes about, math is math, the proof is all that matters”.
Regardless of mathematicians stating the methods outstrip the proof’s importance, still amazing we got an explicit social counterexample as well so quickly.
