This doesn't match my experience at all. What I have seen over and over, for 20 years, is more like this: The local guru is asked to help out with an area that'

This doesn't match my experience at all. What I have seen over and over, for 20 years, is more like this: The local guru is asked to help out with an area that's falling behind, even though everybody knows it's not their thing. They start out awkward, self-deprecating, asking a lot of questions. Yes, they suddenly seem like a newbie. A week or two later, they check in something brilliant that works perfectly and blows the "specialist's" work out of the water. This concept was never meant to be precise. It just expresses that some people's productivity is hard for others to understand and hard to duplicate.