I agree with you, but I think that the reason that so many don't get the chance to work on projects such as these has less to do with proficiency or 'productivi

I agree with you, but I think that the reason that so many don't get the chance to work on projects such as these has less to do with proficiency or 'productivity' (in many, but far from all cases) and more to do with employment and the chance work on self-directed projects. Which is why I wonder about his employment status during that time. Whilst it could be argued that those employed in simpler programming for their day-jobs could come home and work on these sorts of things in their spare time, this of course neglects to take account of the difficulty of maintaining such effort past the 5-8+ hours of concentration one typically puts in. TL; DR: I think there are (have come across) a fair few frustrated programmers out there who could build an achievement record like this if they could put in Bellard's amount of time whilst being paid and otherwise supporting themselves but are 'stuck' in jobs building much simpler, less interesting systems and failing to dig themselves out. As such, I'd like to know how Bellard has been supporting himself.