Balyn was not what would generally be referred to as an intellectual.
(Indeed, he'd once said that out loud to the Doll and he'd swear that tiny cracks had appeared in her porcelain face from the strain of not laughing.)
"Trial and error" was the hunter's preferred problem-solving strategy. Come up with an idea, see if it works, and if it fails, try something else. In a way, it was like the scientific method, experimenting to test one hypothesis after another until finding something that satisfied the conditions. Of course, the scientific method did not generally recommend experiments where the failure state resulted in the experimenter's bloody demise at the hands of savage beasts, arcane constructs, or eldritch horrors, but since the Hunter's Mark shackled Balyn to the Dream and death merely caused him to wake up yet again, he had the ability to effectively employ a higher degree of experimental incompetence in his fieldwork.
Come to think of it, the biggest problem the scholars of Byrgenwerth, Mensis, and the Choir seemed to have was that they utilized roughly the same "try it until you escape death, madness, or being transformed into a gelatinous eyeball horror" methodology without the protection of the Hunter's Dream. Perhaps Balyn wasn't as anti-intellectual as first impressions suggested?
Probably that was going too far.
But even so, he was capable of noticing certain connections of archaeological or anthropological interest. For example, there was the way that the bloodtinged blade of the Chikage, a weapon from Cainhurst, infected those struck with a rapid-acting poison, and that the blood arts of the Pthumerian queen, Yharnam, had the same effect, one more hint suggesting a possible connection between the two cultures. This was key research information he'd obtained by being messily slaughtered quite a number of times by the Chikage-wielding Bloody Crow of Cainhurst, and following that up by being repeatedly drenched in Yharnam's toxic blood.
You'd think she wouldn't be so hostile, Balyn thought, after I saved her baby from the School of Mensis.
But then again, time didn't seem to quite…work right in the old labyrinth. Like he wasn't really visiting them, but stepping into a dream of them from an earlier time.
This Yharnam, for example, apparently hadn't even had her baby yet, judging by how she looked. Indeed, it made Balyn feel a little weird, that he was dodging sprays of blood so he could dart in close and attack a pregnant woman with a saw. It was kind of nauseating, if he thought about it too much.
Fortunately, he was saved from a crisis of conscience over the dark side of a hunter's work when the apparently-unborn baby nevertheless cried out, and Balyn found himself snared in a band of arcane energy. Disdaining more showy forms of finishing him off, the Queen simply glided up to him and stabbed him through the heart.
~X X X~
"Welcome home, good hunter. What is it you desire?"
"Do you have anything for a headache?"
She tipped her head to one side, regarding him with a very familiar puzzlement.
"I thought that your injuries were healed whenever you awakened in this Dream?"
"Well, yeah, that's true, but…beating Queen Yharnam is really turning out to be a royal pain."
The Doll decided that headache medication sounded like a good idea.