add question one:
clearly no.
add q. two:
within this business anyone entering is most likely failing. the odds are heavily against any newbie, even high class background does not raise the chance to survive significantly (that is at least my pracrtical experience). so, following your logic, that would mean that you can't encourage anyone since they all "are not likely to make it". sorry 'bout my digging into semantics - i guess i am in loose wittgenstein mode this morning.
but there is more to it on that second part. i had a programmer two years ago who was good in C++, but had not done trading systems before. i gave him one simple breakout strategy which was lying around, plus the famous turtle paper of curtis faith and he played with long term ma crossovers as well. after three months he came with results and we started trading this conglomerate of three trend followers. trading a sharpe of 1 or so since then on this thing. he was a newbie and just got some directions. that was it.
now one can argue that a sharpe of 1 is not the biggest excitement of all and i completely agree. it took a team of three people here more than a year to develop our pairstrading model. no way a standalone newbie can do that.
so my answer to your second question is that one should be careful judging other people's abilities plus one should not be fixed on what one is doing on his own account. remember alan crary's stuff? nothing spectacular in terms of complexity. yet obviously highly effective.
there is an indian proverb that when you point at someone with your indexfinger, one finger is pointing at him - but three are pointing at yourself. try it out.
peace
