> there is a certain type of person that probably has all the mental horsepower required to be a phenomenal engineer that simply gets stuck on their "elegance"
and
> I do not understand how they are both smarter than me in many respects, and then still don't understand how stupid this all is.
This is such a good question. The absolute worst codebases I've worked on have been created by brilliant individuals. I remember spending months tracking down bugs leading to inconsistencies in the universal "Things" table. "Everything is a thing! Right?!" Wrong...
and
> I do not understand how they are both smarter than me in many respects, and then still don't understand how stupid this all is.
This is such a good question. The absolute worst codebases I've worked on have been created by brilliant individuals. I remember spending months tracking down bugs leading to inconsistencies in the universal "Things" table. "Everything is a thing! Right?!" Wrong...