I'm not saying this is you, but one of the most frustrating programmers I ever worked with (on a major project that you know about and have possibly used) wrote more code than anyone on the team. He plowed through swaths of stuff, leaving behind him ZERO documentation, impenetrable forests, and actually made some of my own code hard for me to understand (I can do that on my own, thank you very much!). Eventually he almost derailed the project, because he became a one man show. People could not follow him. We were not in synch as a team.
The thing I wanted from him was to slow down, and spend more time:
- Improving the quality of the codebase
- Communicating with the team
- Working on things that helped others as well as help him finish features / stories
- Fixing bugs
I do agree that developers can have aptitude for understanding, without being good developers. A good developer creates a quality piece of work, and makes the whole project better.