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I think you've answered your own question here.

I'd put Knuth on stage, because, he's Knuth. You know he'd have something interesting to say that would be relevant to your audience, assuming your audience was the typical reader of this site, of course.

My wife is an avid cook. If she attended a conference on cooking and the organizer put Knuth on stage because he wanted greater representation on cooking from the programming community, even if Knuth was secretly a brilliant cook, the audience would dismiss him.

This is, obviously, further complicated by the fact that putting a person on stage because of an attribute that no person has control over is an unacceptable bias. I'm not saying that's what happened (clearly it's not because the guy had been successful in the past), I'm just putting into context how a statement like that is perceived.