I kinda knew this would turn into an ideological debate.
As a user and not a developer, I would like to point out that the problem with compilation is not that it is not "rocket science", but that it is a tedious process that not all users want to go through even if they know how to do it.
Back in my days of being new to GNU/Linux I compiled a lot of software and even when being keenly interested in doing that I remember being very frustrated as I can rarely recall an occasion when it just worked.
That means that if you do not have all the tools and dependencies, you know as a fact that installing this application will take unpredictable amount of time. Once it'll take you 2 minutes, another it can take up to a day, which had happened to me.
Which is why I personally rely more on ppa's nowadays as I am a little bit tired of compiling things. There are some programs that I never could compile at all, for one reason or another.
So, this has very little to do with learning or intelligence. This has to do with priorities. If a person's priority is to develop and not use, then sure. If a person's main goal is to use GNU/Linux software, then his priority would be to get it running, not dive each time into the intricacies of how things work on code level.
Not to mention, fellas, that there is not much learning value in compiling anyway. I mean, sometimes you just don't have all the dependencies and after you go through the trouble of getting almost all of it, some library requires you to have a different kernel version and there's that.