"Fill-in-the-blanks" science encourages one to see and think linearly, which more often than not, produces results that are often unremarkable, often redundant, and sometimes even useless to science.
It does, however, occur that the text on one side of the blank suggests something completely different than what the other side of the blank suggests. When this happens, the entire text has to be rethought, and this can trigger major discoveries.
(As well as minor ones, such as my reinterpretation of the homology of the bones of the skull roof of the lysorophian "lepospondyls", published as part of a paper on phylogenetics and the origin of lissamphibians in 2008.)