> most successful practitioners of the craft...and often they are so successful by virtue of skills other than the craft itself.

And this is the reason why doing games development on your own is not game development. If you want successfully market your games (and make a living fromit) your end up doing a whole lot of tasks totally unrelated to game coding. It's almost like having that day job again. It is really a "band" job: you need more than one payer. If you start up with a team and you are the coder, than you have chance.