[batista]

>Thomas Kinkade was, I believe, far more prolific than Picasso. But I do not want Kinkade-grade developers.

I meant "prolific" in the sense of producing lots of GOOD work, not merely churning stuff.

Which for Picasso, it was. If anything, the critics agree (which is as far a metric as you get in the fine arts).

>There needs to be some other metric for software development. Figuring out what that should be, and how to accurately measure it, is non-trivial.

Sure, but the "good programmers are X times more productive than bad" (as I see it) is not about producing more code, but about producing more of what a project needs. I.t they are qualitatively more productive, not quantitatively.

Come to think of it, it sounds more of an obvious statement, almost a tautology or truism: "good programmers produce MORE good code than average programmers".