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I meant every word. If any man is now resting in heaven doing systems programming for God himself, it is probably him. He was a prophet in any sense that someone can be a prophet.
I should explain to the uninitiated.
Terry was ostensibly insane, but had the sort of insanity that is paired with genius. If you go try out TempleOS you will be struck by two things. First that it has extremely questionable design choices (such as divinely ordained 640x480) and second that these weird choices seemingly allow it to do insanely powerful things that you may not even have suspected were possible, even if you are OS nerd enough to have used Plan9.
TempleOS is a huge undertaking in its own right, writing a complete operating system is pretty difficult as a team already (take it from someone who has done it), it's a tour de force as a single man. But Terry didn't stop there and made his own optimizing compiler for a C like language that has full reflection support. This alone makes him a pretty competent software engineer and is an impressive feat for someone that debilitated, but writing toy OSes is something smart sane people do too.
What brings him to genius level in my opinion is how he ingeniously solved a lot of the baggage of modern software in his rewrite of everything, making things that seem impossible possible: 3D model editor right in your source code, system wide autocomplete of any function of any program, the list goes on of things that would be dizzingly hard to do under normal assumptions but are here done effortlessly.
He created a fully integrated C64 analogue that blurs the lines between code and data even more than the most radical of Unixes and exploited that property to build unconventional but extremely powerful UI (that looks like absolute garbage at a glance). Good problem solving skills aren't enough to do this, he had a vision, skill and powerful dedication.
Have a look at this review if you want a quick tour of the thing.
In general his philosophy of how computers should be finds the same frustration as OP, myself and many others (such as RMS) in the observed trend that machines have been slowly turned from tools of the users into tools of control. A betrayal of the ideals of the 1980s and hacker culture that we are all the inheritors of. Terry wanted computers to be motorcycles where "everything is open because it's fun", not locked in modern cars.
In my moments of doubt about software architecture I do ask myself "the greatest question in programming", and it isn't out of mockery, but out of respect. So I'll leave you with another of his legendary quotes:
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