> Either I'm bad at communicating today or you're bad at reading

Could be both :)

The way I look at it is like this, and you could call this my thesis: I do not categorically think that code in itself is primarily relevant to us looking at a "software engineer" and saying "wow, she's good." The product (the Linux kernel, in Torvalds' case) is, on the other hand, what actually matters. I think we're getting caught up on the idea of a code review; a code review can serve many purposes, as a code review is basically just people talking about the code, the product, their feelings, and so on. Sure, sometimes it's like "this `i` should be a `j`", but other times it's "this should serve feature X, not feature Y."

Overall, I don't think Torvalds is judged by his code quality. And the snippet I cited is the man himself saying "I don't write code anymore" so I took that at face value, even though my conviction stands wether or not he actually does still write code. I don't think anyone actually cared that much about his code quality (maybe with the caveat that the kernel didn't crash).

PS: I could be totally wrong, and this is an interesting & stimulating conversation, regardless.