Yeah Steve Yegge came across to me as someone who's been in the trenches in the real world of software development for a significant part of his career, while still keeping up with the latest technologies. Not to detract from any of the others' achievements, but some of them have remained primarily focused on their particular field of expertise.

The first paragraph of his wikipedia article bears this out:

"Yegge has two decades of industry experience, developing across domains including embedded operating systems, scalable e-commerce systems, applications for mobile devices, and software productivity tools. In his career he has worked for Amazon.com and Google among others."