These are such silly arguments. I sounds like people looking at a graph of a linear function crossing and exponential one at x=2, y=2 and wonder why the curves don't fit at x=3 y=40.
"Its not the x value that's the problem, its the y value".
You're right, it's not "raw intelligence" that's the bottleneck, because there's none of that in there. The truth is no tweak to any parameter is ever going to make the LLM capable of programming. Just like an exponential curve is always going to outgrow a linear one. You can't tweak the parameters out of that fundamental truth.