> Like many people, Einstein's life and work has been fascinating to me, but in comparison to other brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific.

Looking backward, it is pretty clear that there were lots of people coming up with the formulations for quantum mechanics. Even without Einstein, somebody probably would have handled that stuff.

However, general relativity was definitely ahead of its time. It took decades until we could even test it.

Finally, while Einstein "lost" the Bohr-Einstein debate about the nature of quantum mechanics, the problem was actually the experiments of the day. One of the strikes against Einstein was the fact that the field formulation predicts that excited electrons in atoms do not decay which everybody knew was an incorrect prediction. Except that Einstein WASN'T wrong--if you put an excited atom in a photon trap and isolate it from the rest of the universe it's decay time goes way up. See: "Collective Electrodynamics" by Carver Mead http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collective-electrodynamics