There are all sorts of superstars, and quite often they do things that don't fit this category.

Ever been in a design review meeting where some junior guy who has just joined the team asks a stupid question, and an attempt to answer this inadvertently finds what would have been a very expensive to fix design issue?

Now that might be the only really significant contribution that junior guy makes to the project, but it might have just saved millions, or saved the product, but I bet if you've been in that situation you don't find them heralded as some sort of uber programming hero.

If however the exact same stupid question leading to the exact same problem was found by your super-expensive rockstar programmer, chances are that management would get to hear about how they had saved the project, and their lavish compensation is totally justified.

Corollary: it is therefore in the interest of above-average programmers to perpetuate the myth of programming superstars. Every now and then, everyone ends up in a situation where they can fix some big mistake or solve some big problem with minimum effort. Programmers seen by management as above-average can then use such chance events to reinforce their image of stardom.

But that doesn't seem to be a question of being a better programmer, it seems to be either that you are better at knowing what people want, or that you are luckier because you chose parameters that are closer to what the market demands. You only get a few chances to find those parameters, so either you are really good at learning from what you've seen from other people, or your hunch that this-or-that shooter game is what will be popular.

I'm sure there's a lot of very competent makers in every field who don't get called up to make the thing they are good at, that people also want.