[mbilokonsky]

> My guess is that the gulf between the author and people with autism who are less functional is greater than between a "neurotypical" and the author.

Your guess is wrong. Research shows that people like me still die before 60 from heart attacks and suicide, largely because people like you make assumptions about what may or may not be true about me and then try to hold us accountable to those assumptions.

Further: there is no "high end" of the spectrum, that's not what spectrum means. You're thinking of a gradient, which measures a specific value from 0 to 100 in some normalized sense.

A Spectrum is a gradient of gradients, and "Autism Spectrum" does not refer to the range of "severity" (which as established does not actually exist) but rather to the diversity of presentations.