The money per se is not in the technical individual contributor but delivering some new value that someone will pay for.
So unless you've got a problem amenable to surgery but without procedures with good outcomes for someone like you, you should prefer experience.
It may not be "new", but there's value in the higher probabilities of good outcomes.
In that, software development is very similar, except of course the stakes are fantastically lower.
The money per se is not in the technical individual contributor but delivering some new value that someone will pay for.