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I see that one factor that I failed to consider in writing my response is that my own view of Gygax is colored by two factors which go against the grain of majority opinion.

One is that I failed to take account of how strongly my view of all the eulogies of Gygax is colored by my belief that there is an issue as to what extent he, as opposed to his partners, deserves the credit for the invention of D&D. (I don't have any issues, in contrast, about giving him credit for marketing and thereby spreading D&D, but that's not what his eulogists are mostly giving him credit for.) I acknowledged in my original post that I was not prepared to argue the point. Since I am still not prepared to/have no interest in/doing so, I must in all conscience withdraw that particular objection.

In addition, I have a bit of blue_duck's issue re: being part of a world where "lots of people were coming up with roleplaying stuff and D&D wasn't the only thing out there." I'm old enough to remember the creation of D&D and played it when it *was* the "only thing out there" but I wasn't, at that time, impressed by it; rather, it was later improvements/refinements/spins on the original concept that grabbed my imagination. It's a different situation from Magic: The Gathering, where the original game continues in many ways to be a stronger game than subsequent games that used the CCG concept; D&D really isn't as good as a lot of its competitors. Still, Gygax did spread the meme of the roleplaying fantasy game, and that clearly matters a lot more to many people than it ever did to me.

My second objection was only answered by an unidentified commenter and
trebor1415, which I will answer separately to avoid being nailed by the number of characters in comments limit.