Rand is garbage, and I'm insulted to end up being brought anywhere near that slop in your philosophical address space. The point I'm trying to make is that there is a helplessness taught by the optimizations we structure our societies around. A capitalist, consumerist society is going to focus around training the largest portion of it's population to act as specialized cogs that can be orchestrated by someone the next layer of abstraction up in pursuit of purely profitable/profitmaking engagements.
If you change the optimizations, you change the system. You change the people that compose that system, you change the very bounds of the human experience.
Just look at how much the world changed around the pandemic. The old order of the office & commute was shattered for many. Look at how deemphasis of throwing more fossil fuels at a problem changes the direction of innovation.
You say the Riddle of Mice is ineffable by a single person. I say you're full of it, and looking at the problem wrong. It's completely effable, you just can't imagine society having a place for such a person given your priors about how the world operates. And in that, you may be right!
That does not equal the Riddle of Mice being conquered by a single person can't happen. It's just unlikely, and dhould such an extraordinary individual exist, you'd likely see them as mad.
That's just something you tell yourself to make yourself feel better about trusting the black boxes your life depends on. But it simply isn't true.
People devote their lives to specializing n these things. Yes, "with enough will" - and time, and money - you could pick one or two subjects and do the same. But that still leaves you as a dilettante at best when it comes to everything else.