While so called thinking outside the box can be useful the situation in the gulf is not necessarily amenable to such improvisational methodologies.

The two situations have many differences. First, in the oil fires situation the individual fires were as bad as there were going to get. A failed attempt wouldn't make anything worse. As we saw with the 'top-kill' a failed attempt can potentially make things worse. Snap the well casing off below seafloor level and it could be much worse.

Second, there were a lot of well fires to experiment on. In the gulf there is, may His Noodly Holiness be praised, one well causing the problem. It isn't like you can have four or five divergent options being tried at once. Part of this also has to do with the nature of the location. The ships and equipment used to work on a well a mile underwater are both rare and expensive with little left over for dark-horse efforts.

Third, the number of people with experience and understanding of deep wells is pretty small. Given that things can be made worse and every move in measured in terms of hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour with many millions of dollars of equipment being used it seem unlikely that anyone will send in the janitor and hope he has talents as yet unseen. If you are having your brain operated on you don't want some rank amateur to step up and see if she has a talent for brain surgery she didn't know about.

Fourth, and possibly most importantly, the jet engine method was not used on most of the fires. The idea of using a jet engine isn't really so far outside the box. The Russian army has long used jet engines mounted on ground vehicles to spray a water solution to decontaminate vehicles exposed to chemical weapons.

Also the 'put out instantly' is more advertising hyperbole, and certainly under the category of 'when things go well', than an entirely reliable outcome. Evidently it works on small pipeline and oil well fires but didn't get a chance to fight many fires.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/01q2/stilling_the_fires_of_war-feature

The majority of well fires were put out with established techniques. In the end most novel methods of handling existing situations fail or are no better than existing techniques. The reason behind this is that the existing techniques all started out as novel out-of-the-box thinking that over time were shown to be reliable. Every new idea has to fight it out toe-to-toe against the existing knowledge.

The fact is that nobody has ever plugged a well under the conditions in the gulf. The entire operation has been outside-the-box from the start.