it is a lot easier for a person with a background in science to write congently and compellingly about his accomplishments than it is for a person with a background in writing to build a satellite or a martian rover.

Well, you've convinced me TFF. [You are neither as fallible nor as fiendish as your sobriquet proclaims.]

Perhaps you would agree, in return, that while many were the equal of Einstein in their mastery of "the method", none, not a single one, could hold a candle to the blaze of his imagination, at least during his most productive years.

I also suggest that Einstein's exaltation of imagination in the service of science was more than a conceit. I remember reading that Eistein's visual imagination led him to many of his most profound insights, in particular, his theory of relativity.

Einsten recounts, as I distantly recall, that he imagined a man falling off a roof and the ground rising up to meet him.

This was the "Eureka!" moment which fired and fuelled "the method".

It seems to me, the argument really turns on this single question:

If Einstein had turned his initial "Eureka!" insight over to the other leading masters of "the method" who were working in his field of mathematics/physics at the time, would any of them have come up with the final product as soon as Einstein did, or at all?

If others could have taken Einstein's original insight and produced his Theory in the same time, then we would have proof that imagination is a more valuable commodity [even a far more valuable commodity] than mastery of "the method" itself, wouldn't you say, TFF?

Then again maybe it took an Einsten to find "the method" to prove his 'madness'.