My outside view of him is the same as yours, but remember that he isn't being hired by the outside based on what he is written - he's being hired by someone who has known him extremely well personally, and presumably therefore knows him better than readers do.
I really thought everything he wrote was a combination of PR-feed and opinion. Maybe I didn't follow him as much as you, but it just felt like he had early access to stuff and was able to formulate opinion (correctly/incorrectly) that most of us could have. He certainly didn't come across as a visionary or a pundit to me.