Actually I would count the skills you describe as "smarter." The fact that we don't all assume this is a sign something is wrong. Maybe it lies in that I don't remember too much emphasis in CS education on legibility and maintainability, beyond some token "practicum" classes that focused just as much on the many other "practical" topics like version control, working together, unit testing, etc.

The best programmer I ever worked with had an incredible ability to produce straightforward, simple code, that could have been written by "any fool" ... if "any fool" had gotten incredibly lucky. His code looked so obvious in retrospect, like anybody could do it. He made the difficult look easy. I call that very smart, and you desperately want brilliant people like that.

The programmers I've worked with that were traditionally "brilliant" in the sense of quickly coming up with "clever" but hard to maintain solutions only count in the middle of the pack, and I dreaded working with their code. Their code was more likely to not last as long and be thrown away in a refactor.

So I learned to aspire to be more like the first than the latter. And in doing so I saw just how damned hard it is to create simple looking "any fool could do it" solutions to hard or even medium problems. So many times I thought something was clear, but it was not to others. So many times I only finally thought of the architecture that would make it possible to write it simply and legibly after many iterations through other designs that generated much more complex "clever" code. It made me gain incredible respect for the amount of smarts and experience it takes to generate simple, easy, boring code that anyone can easily read and pick up.