I agree - Adams is incredibly humble (and shy) - and he's driven by making the game he wants to play; he cares less about the mechanisms and more about the results - he wants edifying gameplay and a game that can tell STORIES.
It's almost perfectly the academic/amateur divide if you will; which is amusing given Adams' background in education.
I don't mean to diminish the work of Crawford, but he is building the same kind of simulationst mechanisms that Adams is, but Adams hit on success partly because of his personality.