The Peter Higgs example that people throw around is just not a good one. Higgs was simply among the first to publish an idea that several other people came up

The Peter Higgs example that people throw around is just not a good one. Higgs was simply among the first to publish an idea that several other people came up with basically simultaneously. He then essentially sat on his hands for the remainder of his academic career, at least scientifically, with a dismal output of less than one not-too-impressive paper per decade - at what was arguably the most exciting time for particle physics. For all I know he was an admirable teacher and colleague, but I really think that in a world without Peter Higgs we would not have seen a noticeable regression of theoretical particle physics. There do exist Nobel prize winners from that era who really changed the field, often beyond their prize-winning work: people like Anderson, 't Hooft, Wilson, Weinberg, Gell-Mann, and many others. But Higgs is just not one of them.