I know it sounds crazy, but I think that down the road for the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past number of years, I'm going to have to just sit down and read entire dictionaries, both etymological and regular.
Like, I wouldn't read them all at once, maybe just fifteen minutes a day, but it makes sense for me to make myself pick one up and read the whole d*mn thing cover to cover, with multiple dictionaries.
Like 2-3 times now I've stumbled across really important stuff that's buried in them and that never gets mentioned in even the most detailed grammars of different language stages, but somehow it happens that that stuff has its own dictionary entry. It's like the compiler was super exhaustive and was smart enough to recognize that something different was going on, but they couldn't figure out what it was they were looking at, or how important it is for the study of the language.
In terms of hunting for clues that trigger "aha!" moments, then, it's not a bad strategy at all.
It's just not something that I need to do now, though, because the last thing I need is more writing projects mounting up.
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