The way I see it: Charles made the problem look simple by spending a few months thinking about the whole program, while Alan made the same problem look complicated by writing a bunch of code and always looking busy.

While I agree that Charles is the exception, I don't believe meritocracy is a valid solution; I'll always bet on Charles:

If the project was actually a "3500 lines of code" problem, then Charles might have taken longer to think about it, but it's my experience that Alan never would have finished.