I'm being picky here, but I don't think you portray an fair view of Kuhn's epistemology here.
Kuhn does not define a value-scale of both methods, on the contrary, he merely introduces the concept of different researchs: one being critical (developing new paradigms) and one being accumulating (further refining existing paradigms).
He also hints to the almost inevitably organic interactions between the two, such that critical research naturally evolves from a pragmatic need to express things simply from a new paradigm when the old one becomes too clumsy for a use case.
This is what happened in your example as well. Copernic (and later Galileo) did not invent heliocentrism out of the blue, the theory around it existed since antic Greece. It is even arguably the Renaissance, leading metaphysicists to revisit ancien texts, that spurred the idea to Copernic to consider it. But ultimately the need for the new paradigm was pushed by the need to revisit the calendar, which was drifting, and the difficulty to do it in a geocentric world, where you have to take planet retrocession into account.
Kuhn does not define a value-scale of both methods, on the contrary, he merely introduces the concept of different researchs: one being critical (developing new paradigms) and one being accumulating (further refining existing paradigms).
He also hints to the almost inevitably organic interactions between the two, such that critical research naturally evolves from a pragmatic need to express things simply from a new paradigm when the old one becomes too clumsy for a use case.
This is what happened in your example as well. Copernic (and later Galileo) did not invent heliocentrism out of the blue, the theory around it existed since antic Greece. It is even arguably the Renaissance, leading metaphysicists to revisit ancien texts, that spurred the idea to Copernic to consider it. But ultimately the need for the new paradigm was pushed by the need to revisit the calendar, which was drifting, and the difficulty to do it in a geocentric world, where you have to take planet retrocession into account.