Forming a defensible view on a stock demands pro-level research effort that self-directed investors can't sustain, so they're stuck between 50-page reports and low-effort 'is it a buy?' guessing

Summary

Self-directed value investors who are NOT professionals describe a crushing gap: the only credible way to form a real opinion appears to be the institutional process — digging into business drivers, building financial models, and producing a 30-50 page initiation-style report with DCF and sensitivities (one user needed ~40 minutes of AI ingestion and still generated a 50-page report). That level of work is simply not sustainable for a normal person with a job, so they retreat to low-effort 'is X a buy or sell?' crowd questions that no one can answer because 'it depends on your thesis.' Simultaneously, when these investors try to learn from professionals, they get condescended to with 'I do this for a living, if I have to explain interest rates it's over your head,' leaving them confused, belittled, and without any grounded explanation. Existing tools worsen this: brokerage research, screeners, and analyst reports are either dense pro-grade models that never produce a plain verdict, or jargon-heavy explanations aimed at traders. Nothing meets a normal value investor in the middle — a simple, defensible stance with clear reasoning they can actually understand and act on, without needing a CFA-level workflow. This is unsolved and highly painful because it forces either abandonment of stock picking or blind, uninformed decisions.