[InclinedPlane]

It doesn't take a "rockstar" or a "ninja" or "guru" or what-have-you to be a significantly above average developer.

Often the biggest hindrance to product quality (including performance, reliability, and usability) as well as to development velocity is technical debt. Having a team member who consistently churns out lots of new stuff of excellent quality is great but not nearly as important as someone who is sensitive to and adamant about eliminating technical debt. The cost of such debt balloons exponentially over time and becomes more and more difficult to pay down the longer it's allowed to grow. But even a fairly modest amount of effort consistently applied before technical debt grows out of hand can realize massive gains compared to the more typical scenario where the technical debt is allowed to grow until it threatens the viability of the entire product before it's addressed.

This may not seem very "rockstar" but ultimately it is such folks who keep the system clean who have the most disproportionately large impact on the quality, viability, market success, and total development cost of big projects.

[UK-AL]

Its the guys who layout the overall design, making it is easily extensible and not prone technical debt who make a software project. They may not be the most productive in producing code, but they allow others to be so.

It's usually the same guy going over others peoples code, and reducing technical debt.

[InclinedPlane]

Another thing, a lot of the most important work in development is relatively unglamorous. Most of the time it's better to have a craftsman at work than a diva steering your product in the wrong direction for the sake of looking cool in the moment.