This sounds quite awesome, terrible, and he sounds like he was jumping into a very deep end. Quite sad that he seemingly didn't have someone to tutor/mentor him

This sounds quite awesome, terrible, and he sounds like he was jumping into a very deep end. Quite sad that he seemingly didn't have someone to tutor/mentor him moving to this role. Given that it worked, and there was a learning curve as you described, over a decade, he seems to have had some big amount of determination to get things to work.