Never underestimate adolescents who are not distracted by ordinary teen drama.

They exist, and have truly enviable amounts of time for projects.

Also, don't overestimate compilers (or kernels). They can be much simpler than they might seem! The difficult/tedious parts are optimizations(!) and broad compatibility with bizarre real-world stuff.

Compilers aren't that hard. You'll miss out on user requirements by not knowing about them, but getting older isn't a good way to solve that; instead getting more people to work on your project is.

(But you probably need to be older to be a good project manager.)

I don't find this difficult to believe.

Seems far fetched but ok

A bit. But Linus Torvalds was not much older when he wrote Linux.

It's a game of knowledge and I have time, if you think I don't know what I'm doing please just call it out so I can politely disagree :P

Just you. The best programmers I've known were about that age. (Hell, I'm pretty sure my own peak programming years were about that age)

Same, early 20s.

Why though, it seems with time we learn a LOT more and then there are 100 ways of doing things and get into analysis paralysis. The passion hasn't been the same as well.

Chris Lattner was 21 or 22 when he created LLVM.