It's mostly raw passion. You can't get a 9-to-5 worker excited enough to learn something from scratch over a weekend just to do something she thinks is "cool".

There's also a difference between a better programmer vs more productive. I will never be as productive as the two that I mentioned, but I'm pretty good at programming. I have enough experience to know how to develop a feature and a set of code such that it's easy to read, easy to maintain and doesn't have very many bugs. That's just something I've learned over time. Others may be much more productive than me, but I rarely have to revisit features due to bugs. So there are different measures based on what you want from a team.