No, the brilliance was evidenced elsewhere. The fact that this person was unaware of (or didn’t appreciate) prior art and had to invent everything from scratch

No, the brilliance was evidenced elsewhere. The fact that this person was unaware of (or didn’t appreciate) prior art and had to invent everything from scratch when it could have been pulled off the shelf wasted a lot of time debugging and running into mistakes that other people had already run into and solved. His brilliance meant we succeeded in spite of this stupid habit.