Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is about material that didn't exist before. The existence and effect of it should suffice. How it is produced is a later step.
Well, in the case of LK-99 the production method itself seems to be part of the puzzle, and the original authors aren't noticeably better at it than anyone else. Even their best sample doesn't fully levitate. We need higher quality samples in order to determine whether the thing actually superconducts, because it's really hard to measure the resistance of small grains of material buried inside a mostly useless rock.
It is certainly not a part of the puzzle here.
The puzzle is to reproduce the experiment, but you claim the original experiment itself is bogus...