Was falling in love with those particular tools optimal for the photographer, musician, gearhead? Could they have made more money, created more if they had broadened their horizons?

It all depends on if the goal is to make as much money as fast as possible or to have fun and satisfy yourself intellectually.

There's nothing wrong with loving programming language X, but I wouldn't make career or project decisions based on enjoying the syntax of one vs the other.

imho the difficult part is figuring out the logic of the program, determining which libraries to commit to, writing any novel algorithms and engineering the system so it runs efficiently and doesn't fall over.