[LeifCarrotson]

I agree, but I also think that the best engineers I work with are not the best inventors. Good engineers who get distracted and fall behind, preferring to optimize or analyze a problem that's been solved well enough to get shit done make much better inventors.

If Eli Whitney had instead built a marginally better set of brushes for slaves to work with and gone on with his day, the story of the cotton gin would be very different.