Good points. To go further, the analogy I give is it is like hiring Stephen king vs a mediocre writer. The latter can get some interesting articles written, but the former will spawn book series, spinoffs, movies.
Which is to say, I think there is a non linear effect to product quality provided by engineers who build the exact right thing and build it well. (For exact right thing, to illustrate, there are 1000s of requirements in a software system, perhaps more. Meanwhile there might be 100s of JIRA items. Meaning, there is a magnitude order gap between specified requirements and the rest. All requirements need to be coded up whether you know about them or not. The pro engineer will bridge this gap, the mediocre engineer will NPE instead)