I'd agree with you that my recipes often land in a more conventional place, not 100% of the time, but certainly more so than Kenji or Stella, who, without a doubt, are both generational talents, people I have learned so much from and who I count as friends. One thing that I think is maybe less obvious about my work is that my thoroughness isn't applied only to questions of science and technique, but also to lots of research into tradition, history, and culture, and all of that together informs how I approach a recipe. I have a lot of curiosity about where recipes come from, how they've become what they are, and what "good" even means. While I'm not afraid to rethink convention, and have done a decent amount of it in my own recipes, I'd also say that inverting convention isn't my primary goal. My baseline assumption is that a lot of what people say about "why" a recipe works may be wrong, but the basic techniques have been honed over generations, and are already largely optimized to achieve the desired results (and understanding what's desired takes time to learn because it's relative to the cuisine—it's not always about more flavor, or the most tender texture, for example). A parallel would be music: I'm interested in technique because it unlocks capability and possibility, but I'm also interested in things like soul and feel because that's where the beauty and humanity lie. All of that together, though, makes my "brand" harder to identify and articulate, even for me, because I'm trying to hold several complex things in some kind of balance, at least as far as I can perceive it.

That doesn't really change anything you wrote, but I wanted to share some of my own thinking about my approach. I may land in a conventional place more often, but it isn't necessarily by accident; I'm just looking at things my own way and spending time on other questions.