> today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success

That is a lie. To achieve anything similar to what Quake and Doom were at their time, one must possess raw undiluted talent and no amount of tools, libraries or online resources are going to help.

If it was that easy, we'd see masterpieces pop up every few months. But instead the market is flooded with mediocrity. Which really should come as no surprise, because we know that 90% of everything is crap. That includes people: most people (including myself), unfortunately, aren't half as smart and talented as they think they are. Which is why we struggle to create things that could be considered merely "good", and "great" is completely outside of our reach.