It's more than that, I think: I've worked with people of his caliber in other fields, and I can appreciate that they need to work at their own pace.

e.g., if he submitted QEMU as a patch for bochs, and it was rejected (for whatever reason), does anyone think his time was better spent fixing that patch?

He produces ingenious, high quality code, and does so at an unbelievable rate (note, none of his open source projects is related to his day job as far as I can tell - except perhaps the ASN 1 compiler).

I think he is arguably optimizing his contribution to society, and I hope he keeps doing that. Let people who can't produce the core do all the integration/politics/detail stuff.