I am theoretical computer scientist. I am currently working in a local university in south asian country. I have tried my best in the past to publish the research in good venue but have been failed. Now I am okay or fine with publishing in low tier conferences.

I have one doubt about my approach. I read top conference papers like STOC,FOCS,SODA and understand them if they seems interesting to me. Then I try to rephrase a research mentioned in the paper. After working on that question results in a paper.

The problem with approach is it takes quite a time to read and understand papers from top conferences as they are lengthy and nontrivial. This some time takes 4-5 months and total time for one paper is around 6-7 months. Many times it seems after reading these papers that there is no scope of improvement. In that case to me it appears that I should have read a paper of a conference which is not top tier. Lets say paper X is published in tier 2 conference then in most of the cases the reason it has been published in tier 2 is incomplete solution (partial solution to a problem).

Now the question is How to research if my goal is to publish and not to bother about ranking of the conference in efficient manner (time and energy)