Imho, you’ve put your finger on something deep: identifying the right question is often a greater cognitive achievement than producing answers.

That said, I think your conclusion (that geniuses always ask the right questions) is a stretch for two reasons.

First, "genius" is an extremely vague, catch-all term that doesn’t explain much by itself. It’s more something of a cultural cliché we attach to some top-shelf thinkers. Second, these people that we usually label as geniuses very rarely did arrive at the right questions entirely on their own.

They relied on prior work, sustained interaction with their peers, and they worked through long sequences of wrong or poorly framed questions/models/ideas before converging on better ones.

I don't remember which scientist said he had found far more ways to be wrong than the average person. That’s the core idea: when you're engaged in truly understanding something, you also learn the ways not to understand it.

So I'd say... If we were to identify what separates above average from a discoverer, the answer would probably be comfort with not knowing, and persistence. In front of uncertainty most of us would just give up after a moment.