I know one of the people who literally wrote a chunk of the matching engine on one of the larger exchanges. He’s not absurdly rich but a book from him on high performance order book management at scale would absolutely worth a read.
The metaphor is appropriate because quite frequently people who use things to the greatest effect know very little about the implementation or how it actually works.
That's a reasonable argument then, and now I appreciate the metaphor.
If one is interested in the technical details of implementation for technical reasons, I would agree that a brilliant and interesting engineer wouldn't necessarily be in line to profit from their value creation although would be available to discuss mechanics of implementation.
The metaphor is appropriate because quite frequently people who use things to the greatest effect know very little about the implementation or how it actually works.