Robots should be weeding, removing insects, and all that other drudgery because it's a never-ending struggle that's essential to good yields, but also so time-consuming we'd go bankrupt paying living wages to people tweezing every bug off of every plant.
More than his skill I'd argue his enthusiasm and apparently boundless passion for these things was the brighest part of his persona. There might be better programmers and better writers, but he's always been one of the best at making what he loved seem fun, interesting, and worth taking up as a career.
Science fiction may have lost another great, but I'd bet he inspired many writers in his time.
A major system like that can't shift very often because if it changes even slightly it brings down a proverbial house of cards built on top of it.
Little inconsequential libraries can move fast and break things, though there's a peculiar paradox here. As the number of dependencies grows, the tolerance for change decreases, yet in terms of perception, little libraries that aren't major dependencies that change frequently look untrustworthy and are liable to never be trusted because of their flux.
That is, if you want to be successful, be predictable and consistent even if that means being leaving some potential unrealized.
What's a good non-UNIX open-source operating system that's useful for day-to-day work, or at least academically significant enough that it's worth diving in to?