To Joseph:
You say that “Becoming a “gadol” is not just for the brightest…”
Well, its clear that I am living proof of your comment but that also makes my point. It is relatively easy to determine after a modest amount of time which of the guys shteiging in the beis medrash are “gadol” material and especially which ones have more than a .0001 percent likelihood of becoming a “gadol hador”. Its unfair to both baalei tzadakah and the bochur himself to use scarce resources for someone in his mid-20s to be painfully trying to understand the complexities of “shor sh’nagach shor”. In some utopian society with unlimited resources, maybe…but in the real world, have everyone find some vocation in which they can excel and move on from that in which they cannot.