“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
Richard Feynman
New thinking then is welcomed unless you think it is already understood. Sources of inspiration can come from anywhere. That's the stage at which we are at.
I think the issue is what it means to 'understand' quantum mechanics.
A *lot* of people can use QM to make predictions about the real world that then come true in experiments. They can use QM to say what will happen in a wide variety of situations and to considerable precision. Feynman, as an example, was an expert on this.
So, at the level of 'shut up and calculate' (which Feynman suggested), a lot of people understand QM.
The next level up is having a 'feel' for what the calculations will give *before* they are done. This is also very common. I would say that most PhDs in physics are at this level. I also think that this is what most people would call 'understanding QM'. And, even when Feynman made his quote, it was false at this level.
The difficulties come when people try to see QM as talking about *classical* particles moving around and interacting. So, we might ask what an electron was doing between when it was made and when it was detected. For this, there is no answer, partly because QM is absolutely silent on the issue.
There is also the problem that people assume that electrons (or other quantum particles) have definite properties (like position, spin, etc) at all points in time. Again, this is NOT what QM actually says. In fact, QM results specifically say this is NOT what is going on.
So, the problem is trying to understand QM using *classical* notions of particle, matter, energy, etc. This leads to all sorts of paradoxes and seeming contradictions.
But the problem is trying to use classical ideas to understand the description that *replaced* classical ideas. It is like trying to understand Newton's laws of motion using Aristotle's physics. It simply won't work.