Reality shows us, 99.999999% of the value is in the implementation of the idea, the idea is nearly worthless.
Obvious solutions are only obvious after they have been solved. The fact that I can explain how an incandescent lightbulb works, a semiconductor, nuclear fusion and fission, does not put me on the level of the giants (and teams of giants) who made those discoveries. Those discoveries were made from deliberate acts of innovation that Linus declares to be bullshit and you declare to be worthless. Who gives a shit about incrementalism. Of course all discovery is built on the foundations of prior discovery, I fail to see how that somehow devalues actively engaging in innovation.
You know, I can make perfect implements of all of those things every day for the rest of my life. I can sing the shit out of a Bon Jovi song. But no one will remember me for my perfect implementation of someone else's ideas. Because we all know that someone reasonably skilled could have done what I did.
To believe that having a solid grasp of the theory of relativity makes you equal to Einstein with respect to net value to the world, is the sheer epitome of hubris. 98%+ of those ideas fail not because the implementation was bad, but because they were bad ideas in the first place. I certainly concede that a good idea without a good implementation will have no realized value. But good ideas are HARD to come by. Implementing good ideas is just work, not to be diminished and certainly of value, but the implementation is rarely the thing of scarcity that leads to intrinsic value.
When was the last time you went and performed static and/or dynamic code analysis and performance profiling to fully optimize the toUpper function of the String class that you wrote in order to squeeze 3 more clocks cycles over the version provided with your SDK.
But that seems to be the question that most are reacting to. This was not a question about premature optimization, we all (hopefully) understand the problems with that. But if you don't consider computational complexity when coding until it becomes a problem, then you have no business being paid for your work. Period.
"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll