Absolutely. Linus recognized three things: 1. There is no good solution to merging (the only theoretically interesting aspect of source control.) 2. Of all

Absolutely. Linus recognized three things: 1. There is no good solution to merging (the only theoretically interesting aspect of source control.) 2. Of all the "bad" solutions to merging, the best one is to handle whatever cases you can and delegate all other cases to humans. 3. There was a lot to be gained from applying serious brainpower to the supposedly easy, supposedly theoretically boring aspects of version control. Linus has a brilliant technical mind, but unlike most brilliant people, he does not have tunnel vision that steers him towards problems that are already framed as "interesting" problems in an existing theoretical framework.