EUV machines were in development for nearly 20 years before they could reach actual chip production.
The secret sauce was not getting it to work, but getting it to work stable enough such that it can be sustained millions of times per second. I am sure there were other huge challenges in bringing to market though, I am not an expert on this either.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. The design is so complicated that the hard part is actually getting it to work reliably in production. So it could just be that the current way is the only fundamental design that works and there is no radically simpler way to make EUV lithography work, but 99% of the time there is.
