However, I think Carver Mead also mentions this about "Collective Electrodynamics". Feynman got a lot of it right, but there were gaps and he simply bulldozed over people who poked at the gaps--sometimes because he believed it obviously true and sometimes because he wanted to dissuade people from working on something he was already working on himself.

It's kind of a bad habit of lots of academics. Nobody has the time to understand the whole stack of things you stand on, so someone (generally junior) poking at something way down the stack is generally going to get brushed off with "That's obviously true". And, generally, that's fine. But, sometimes it's not and in engineering sometimes it has a cost.

A vital part of engineering is communication. For example, I have calculated the resonant frequency of a microprocessor power grid using a Poynting vector formulation. It was very clever and very accurate, but completely indecipherable to most engineers. It was my job to correlate that with something that fellow engineers understood and trusted.