Nice article, I'll definitely read some of the outlined books. Thanks for sharing.

My personal experience is that you don't need to fully understand the Black Scholes Pricing model in order to trade profitable options.

As an example consider the public income trades, such as NetZero, Boxcar, M3, Theta Engine. Trading those doesn't require you to understand how Implied Volatility.

One can argue, however, that selling options and hedging them isn't the 'Quant way' of profiting from options.