Most of these are excellent pieces of advice, and practices I generally try to adhere to. I don't use schema as much as I used to, but timbre is fantastic, clojure.test is great, and all of the core points are excellent. I've never had cause to use agents or STM, and atoms are best used when enclosing some stateful function.
In my experience the answer is yes but there isn't necessarily a hurry. I work in a small shop with 3 other Clojure developers who vary in experience from pretty green (I'd dabbled a bunch but have only been writing it professionally for about 4 months) to wizard (people who are going on two years and written the majority of the libraries we use, who are fluent in pretty much everything all the way up the stack). The learning curve for me has been like this:
Stage 1: Deep end. Given a task, I crack open an existing application and spend half a day to a day just trying to read it and figure it out. I struggle with my notions of state and immutability, make and test some changes until I think I have it figured. It's slow and arduous, at this point I'm reading Chas Emerick's book and mostly writing very standard clojure, dipping into and experimenting with things like multimethods and atoms.
Stage 2: Local maximum. I'm comfortable with some of the better patterns to pass around and manage state, make a lot of use anonymous functions, and a lot of my code looks like a let to establish useful local variables followed by a return. I get comfortable with writing programs either from the top down or bottom up, slowly building to a point where everything ties together. I start dipping my toes into core.async.
Stage 3: I get very comfortable with core.async and appreciate channels as a really nice way to separate concerns, you can build a whole bunch of neat little machines with channels. Sometimes I go a little overboard and roll something back to just using functions.
Stage 4: Start writing code where you realize you could use a macro. Macros feel about as hard as stage 1, with careful repl development and scrabbling to build some kind of conceptual framework where the whole thing hangs together. Transducers come out, I read about them and understand them conceptually, and get pretty excited about the use of pipelines, which present a much nicer way to chain channels together (where before you might use a map or write custom functions to do channel transformations, but they don't prove to be very composeable).
That's pretty much where I'm at right now. I'm comfortable, but there's still a lot of stuff I haven't really jumped into. One nice thing about most of these constructs is that if my conceptual grasp is wrong, things usually don't work at all, and that's a good time to ask questions to others.
As far as building a team? If progressing through those stages and having days that are frustrating followed by some big breakthroughs seems appealing, that's probably a good indicator that you'd fit into this sort of environment. When I was dabbling I made some progress and started to understand some of these mechanisms, but sometimes you need a problem staring you in the face that requires some fancy moves to solve to motivate you to push past what you know.
It seems daunting at first, but I sort of think that all of programming is. Practical knowledge can be acquired through experience, but it's expanding how you work theoretically that is the hardest and most rewarding.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert Heinlein
As much as I believe (and I do) in the importance of technical and mathematical literacy, it's no more important than the perspective that can be gained from, say, learning to knit or beatbox. There are very few skills that don't teach some sort of methodical problem solving, the rest is just domain.
I'm getting a pretty sensationalist vibe off of this article, it's got the feeling of something written by a lobbyist.
Used games don't strike me as the cause of game variety disappearing, but instead the increasingly large amount invested in each individual project, discouraging all but the safest options.
Playing the violin on behalf of the indies seems disingenuous too, many of them publish via Steam or online stores of some description, where a used market can only exist if explicitly enabled.
I should clarify that I don't see technological implications as central themes in IJ, but I do find it really intriguing that rather than excluding or hand-waving issues that have to do with technology he dives in and gives them what seems to me a great deal of good, hard thought.
The book hit me really hard emotionally as well, and for me a lot of the anxiety centered around how fragile our assumptions are with regards to communication. All of DFW's exhibits to me a neurotic fixation with the other person understanding exactly what you mean (compact history of Infinity especially, where the book reads differently depending on how comfortable you are with exploring some of the proofs and concepts involved, you could skip the I.Y.I's and still get a really strong and interesting book, but the experience would be different), and it is a lot of that anxiety that hit me hard.
It just seemed interesting to me that technology and media fit so well with that central emotional point. If we can't even communicate to people in writing or speech, mass communication could fare not better.
It's sort of like talking about all of the AA reference in the book. As a topic there are a lot of things you can say about addiction and rationalization and human ritual, but AA was just a handy analogy to talk about all of that stuff, and more importantly to evoke certain feelings in the reader.
It's easier to talk about the set pieces of the book than it is to try and clearly articulate how it makes me feel, is all.
A Compact History of Infinity was pretty tremendous. And while it makes some amount of sense that he's be apt to deal with questions of metaphysics from a formal standpoint, there are some more unusual topics in there, like that bit from Infinite Jest about the evolution of videophones and the use of masks.
I think some of his best work centers on the ability (or even possibility) to communicate with other people, and how technology has a lot of potential to disrupt it.
Probably one of the most unlikely guys to talk about some of the interesting/terrifying implications of technology on communication and interaction (among many other things)