The downside of picking a "hot" thesis topic

Chris over at the Mission Control ALM blog shares some of the challenges of picking a "hot" thesis topic. Chris' thesis will explore issues related to contractors in the Iraq war. While these issues have been in the headlines in recent months, and there's tons of journal articles, books, and primary sources to reference, the challenge is finding an original topic that hasn't been explored:

I see now that I picked a topic that had some research difficulties built into it. If you choose a subject that's current, hot, and much-written about, it's that much harder to sift through what's out there and find a thread that hasn't been worked on or needs more done on it. First, start with an avalanche of materials -- primary source and secondary. Then, skim through it and see what hasn't been covered. Next, come up with an idea that is both insightful and substantive, that can be explored, and for which you can find solid evidence.

I had a different sort of challenge for my thesis -- identifying existing research for an obscure topic, and whittling down the focus to something manageable and testable. Primary sources weren't a problem (I used thousands of articles from the Xinhua News Agency) but there wasn't much recent literature on the foreign policy issues involved -- in fact, the two sources that I tested my data against were a journal article from the late 1980s and a book from the early 1990s. And while the computer content analysis literature is quite extensive, I was unable to find any specific studies that were based on Xinhua's English-language service.

I suppose a safe middle ground between my approach and Chris' approach would be finding a topic that's not too hot, but has enough existing, recent literature behind that points to a clear path for new research.

But that would be too easy, wouldn't it?