The reason that it took so long to find was that the cross-section of production is very low, the decay signatures are hard to separate from the background, the specific energy scale it existed at was not well-defined, and building the LHC was (to put it mildly) difficult and expensive.
Roughly, if you'll forgive a bad analogy from a long-lapsed physicist, it was the equivalent of trying to find a very weak glow from a specific type of bug hiding at an unknown location in a huge field of corn. Except that your vision was very bad, so you had to invent a new type of previously-unimaginably excellent eyeglasses to see the thing. Also before you could even start looking you had to expend a painful amount of time and money building a flashlight so incredibly huge that it needed new types of cryogenic cooling inventing, just to stop it from melting when you switched it on.
If you had a software bug that you were almost certain was there, but you needed half of the world's GPU clusters for three years to locate and prove it, then that would be a Higgs-Bugson.