I feel you.

> I see people are more motivated to pursue topics they feel they will be "scooped" on if they delay even one conference cycle...

I also see this often and so I use the inverse of this as the guiding principle in much of my work. If I feel like this is a topic I'd get 'scooped' on if I didn't publish quickly enough then I look for another topic to work on. It usually feels nicer to do 'slow' research. However, it can be a bit isolating.