I used to (half) joke about another option: (d) it could be cost effective for a company to spend money hiring and wasting excellent talent if it prevents their competitors from doing something genuinely valuable with that talent.

Unlikely. No "talent" would agree to waste their life in such a scenario, worrying about "being found out for not contributing to the bottom line".

That's kinda what makes them a talent — almost a tautology.

I dunno, money talks

For a short while, maybe.

"Excellent talent" means a strong inner drive, it takes something like an obsession to put in the grind to get there. The feeling of contributing and creating and playfulness and attacking new frontiers is non-negotiable. You lose it, you're no longer "excellent talent".

No money can replace that (though life circumstances may force a detour — that's why it's almost a tautology, but not quite).

"Being found out for not contributing"? You know you can do better.

There could be cases where exceptional talent is kept motivated on exciting cutting edge projects, but those projects don't "contribute to the bottom line", either because the project is canned or doesn't generate enough profits (or cut enough costs) or some other reason. The chances are that these cases wouldn't be an intentional waste of talent, but if you've been around a while you sometimes start to wonder.

If it wasn't c) the company wouldn't exist, even if b) is true.

At my company I think it's true that a small % are the driving force, in terms of our central product, but the rest are important in that the company would be dysfunctional to the point of collapse if that small % also had to take care of the ancillary tasks they do.

There's a bunch of additional work required to maintain the product outside of developing it in the first place. The brilliant product developed needs to be refined, marketed etc.. and all of those have support structures in place which sometimes amount to "work". Reports, analysis, collate data etc... integrate with X, all work that may not be what you sell but support the organization to sell what you sell.

It’s B. Usually just can’t get rid of A because of politics. Enjoy the free lunches though.

In my experience it's a combination of b) and c): most of the added value is generated by a surprisingly small number of "heroes" and everyone else is just there to support them. While the random office drone's contribution to the project's success is small, the fact that none of the "heroes" had to bother spending time and effort on that little side task enabled the team as a whole to solve the difficult issues quicker.