Judging by your posts, it's certainly about expertise. And Gavin's attitude is likely also the result of his expertise allowing him to grasp the concept.
It's time. Given same amount of time, you can only become an expert in a specific area, this unavoidably limited your view. Or you can select to be a generalist thus giving up details (The smallest project I managed had 100+ developers, I seldom go below system integration level to check the codes)
I say this again: Bitcoin is a monetary system. To design and maintain a monetary system, you need at least the view of the central bank, not the view of programmers, because the programmers are in the lower part of financial industry, and they lack of overview of whole financial world
If in your eyes bitcoin is just a payment system, then naturally you are aiming to defeat paypal and visa, which is the industry leading solution. But this is almost the lowest level of concern for central banks