I realised a while back that music theory is like modular synthesis.

You can keep collecting modules - ideas about theory - forever. But only one person in a hundred, at most, knows how to make them work together to produce something audiences are going to want to hear more than once.

Coltrane may have been one of those people. But if he was, it was because he was Coltrane.

Most people who play with these ideas aren't. And acquiring more ideas and theories won't change that for them.