There were multiple people/teams that were turned away from creating a bitcoind implementation during the first few months. The reason was, JR insisted that "he alone would create the reference client". Not sure why JR never did any programming. It would only be speculation that he is incapable, or maybe was too busy popping champagne.
I definitely never said anything like that, or turned anybody away who genuinely wanted to help out. The only person I turned away was this one random stranger who approached the foundation asking for a huge lump payment to develop the reference client for us. We actually briefly considered it, since he seemed possibly legitimate, but decided if it was too big a gamble. That guy went on to fork our project and create Counterparty. With the benefit of hindsight, I might choose differently if I did it over again, but with the information available at that time, it was the right decision not to hand over roughly half of our cash on hand (if I recall correctly) to a random guy approaching us on the internet.
Oh, and there was this other really smart guy, not so random, who we asked to look at our protocol and make some suggestions. He came back with this really complicated scheme for turing complete money. I told him we needed to finish our core features before tackling something that ambitious. He took the idea and ran with it to become Ethereum.