Well, I gave an example a little further above regarding the latest cover for Ancient History magazine.
The main problem I had was with your use of the term “accurate research”, which suggests that there is a single Truth to be uncovered through rigorous research. I was trying to point out that even if you engage in serious research, you’re still going to end up with having to pick sides in a particular debate. If we all agreed on everything, there would be little need for the conventional back-and-forth found in academic journals or at conferences.
But if you want concrete examples, I’ll take something from my own PhD research – the issues regarding hoplite warfare in ancient Greece. There are two main questions: (1) what was hoplite warfare like, and; (2) what were circumstances and consequences of the invention of hoplite warfare. There are two main camps: the orthodoxy (now seemingly on the way out) that holds that hoplite warfare can be defined as more or less heavily-armed spearmen fighting in formation (phalanx), which came about ca. 700 BC and was associated with the rise of a farming “middle class” and the emergence of the polis (city-state). Opposite this group are the so-called “heretics” or revisionists who believe that hoplite warfare is not as easily defined, that while the arms and armour developed ca. 700 BC, the tactics of fighting in formation developed later (some saying even after the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BC), and that the introduction of the hoplite wasn’t accompanied by any kind of sweeping socio-political changes.
The hoplite debate has been going strong for at least thirty years and the revisionist ideas have slowly become more widely accepted. But still, if you were to, let’s say, develop a game that modelled ancient Greek city-states in the period ca. 700-400 BC, you’d have to make a few decisions: do you go with the orthodoxy and have your hoplites fight in phalanx or do you pick the revisionist interpretation and have phalanx fighting be something that develops over time instead? You can support whatever choice you make using decent arguments, but you’re still likely to get comments/complaints from people who disagree with the theory you decided to support.
Secondly, I wouldn’t say a priori that simply inventing something is easier than doing actual research. My point in saying that it gives the creator more leeway is that it’s the creator in charge of the world he creates, i.e. the creator lays down the rules. By creating something original (or semi-original if inspired by or based on historical events/situation, like Game of Thrones or older fare like Howard’s Conan stories), the creator will never run into a situation where people will complain about his/her interpretation of the past.
Simply put, I doubt that people like Martin or Tolkien would ever claim that creating their fictional worlds was in any way “easy”. Even when creating a new world, it has to make some form of sense, and that requires thinking about socio-political structures, religions and mythologies, and so forth. History, in this instance, can be a source of inspiration, without the creator running the risk of introducing historical mistakes or picking a particular interpretation that his/her readers/viewers/players might strongly disagree with.
Anyway, I’ve written a blog post about history as a source of inspiration a while ago; it might be interesting to read since it ties into the discussion here.