Those are good points. I would personally narrow it down to the personality type of the individual. I personally do much better self-learning than in a class room. I taught myself how to program after dropping out of business school and it was the best choice I've ever made.

I have a feeling this dichotomy (between self-learning vs classrooms) will be especially true for coding far more often than most subjects. Also anecdotally I found a part-time university course in english/writing to be the opposite of my experience vs learning coding.

That would really be the difference in whether or not I recommended someone down a particular path. But I also believe this is what makes someone a good developer - even outside of the learning experience. Basically your interest and motivation in the subject outside of formal settings. Which drives talented devs towards OSS projects and learning new languages.

Although not everyone has to be above average at their jobs to be functional. There are plenty of BigCo programming jobs where you could be generally disinterested in off hours and still be of value to the organization (see: I've met a number of Java/C++ devs who would fit this category who work in big teams and are happy/functional). Those people would probably be better suited for coding schools. And would probably be a large percentage of those leaving the military for retraining, so I support the OPs mission.