No amount of any more observations of the falling of an apple is going to produce an explanation for gravity.

No amount of any more of "empirical evidence" for the apple falling is going to advance anything any further.

While gravity is something that must objectively exist, the explanation for it must come out of thin air, to be produced by some creative mind due his imagination, because it's something that we've never seen before. It's a totally new explanation that never existed before. You also can't obviously "see" gravity, because it's an explanation and it's not something observable. It can only be "seen" indirectly through something else.

And that's exactly what Newton did. While he was a brilliant mathematician, he also had a brilliantly creative mind that allowed him to find the path to calculate the mathematics of gravity.