I was more trying to point out the inventing spirit, something that Westley had in spades. He had a very creative mind. Sure, it might be a little annoying that he never failed at anything, but throwing his human failings in your face is hardly heroic, something that everyone else on the show was as well.Jordanis wrote:The problem is that your examples of when it didn't take real-world experience to create something will invariably come from the infancy of each respective field. By the time the field is mature, the encyclopedic knowledge of what has been tried and why or why not it worked that is required to create something new means you need to have been working in that field long enough to pick it up.
Microprocessor design, for instance. The first ones, with a few thousand transistors, could be the products of one guy working from a basic computer science degree. Modern ones, with hundreds of millions, are the products of a design team with intimate knowledge of what came before and how they might improve. Chances are if you come up with an idea, someone will tell you "we tried that in '98. It turned out that it was too fiddly to produce reliably in the fab", or something to that effect. That's just what happens in mature fields.
Even when Picard failed, it was a good thing, as it helped make him who he was. I can't even recall an episode that pointed out one of Riker's failings, nor Troy, or most of the others. Data's failings are numerous and what makes him heroic, as he is constantly trying to overcome them.
Also, one does not need encyclopedic knowledge from decades of experience if one understands the Why of things. Some people need those decades of experience in order to impart that understanding of WHY. The rare few, do not.
