>>I'm not sold yet on whether that is a "great trait", as you tend to infer. I still look for hard working DBA's in interviews, not intellectual+lazy ones<<
I think the problem here is that I wouldn't want either trait as a standalone trait. This blog is part of a series (https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/author/2155-louis-davidson/) of traits that all add up to a great DBA (over 20 at last count). So the ideal DBA (or person truly) is both hard working AND lazy AND intellectual.
I (let's say have) work (ed) with many hard working, absolutely awesome people. Many of these would work on a problem for days, then report back they were finished. Looking at their code, they have done everything the absolutely most difficult way possible, and worst yet, often without tools that are commonly known (or easily creatable, like using sys.tables to get a list of tables rather than typing themselves to make some setting for all tables.) When I get the code and review, due to my years of not doing things manually, and always looking for a shortcut, I can often solve their problems in 10 minutes instead of 10 days.
I don't think we are in disagreement here at all, just hopefully that the trait in the topic as the primary driving factor would not exactly be the best case. In fact, most of the other traits in my series imply/require hard work Tenacity for sure, Curiosity, even Failure as a trait is more about hard work in the face of failure and learning from the failure than anything.