I don't have a basis for how long this might take. As the author mentions "All bugs become shallow once they can be reproduced.", but only after spending probably the largest amount of time waiting for new incident reports to come in, and then analyzing the reports (e.g. to determine most incidents occurred on the last day of the month), and hours staring at application and kernel code. It's very impressive, but certainly the largest amount of time in the 10 month duration was not actually debugging. The "moment of extraordinary clarity" probably sprung out of years of experience.
Reading the last paragraph, I did not come away with the same impression you did: "Regina is now a photography technician at Barnet and Southgate College."
I think your statement is more true of CentOS than Ubuntu. Many Ubuntu server installations choose it because it is free and reputedly easy, and pass up CentOS because it doesn't have a lot of selling points that appeal directly to non-Linux users, nor RHEL because it costs money.
Also your comment reminds me of an argument against stealing music on the Internet, lol.
I wanted to voice my concurrence with the sentiment ensconced in the rudeness you are probably being downvoted for: I am in my twenties, generally operate from the perspective of one who thinks he "has shit to do" (in fact I use that very phrase frequently to characterize my obligations and commitments), and don't see myself having time to learn a new tool, method, or technique every time I have a need to express myself, whether professionally or personally. I don't believe this attitude is uncommon and is probably worth taking into consideration by those who would persuade people like your brother and me to use new things. Such as node.js.