[roosterdawn]

Counterpoint: the better you get at copying, the faster you accelerate your ascent towards being exceptional. Copying is generally the beginning, not the end. By this anti-copying logic, practicing scales on an instrument shouldn't have any bearing on playing a complicated piece of music, only playing that piece, right? And yet, practicing scales until they're perfect and mastered pays dividends because the closer they get to second nature the more firmly they can serve as a foundation for second order skills.

Learning how to copy things is an art in and of itself. A lot of engineers (myself included) got into the craft by taking things apart and putting them back together again. It's true that you cannot become a good engineer /only/ by doing this, as at some point, you must learn how to create things from scratch that you've never taken apart and never put together before. It's true that teaches you a lot, but I think it's a little bit of a stretch to imply that it's the only thing that can teach you.