But he was a first pioneer like Crammond and others.... So he deserves is success, as he deserves to be called a businessman now (to be honest, he was so by the times of Pirates! Gold....)
Yes, Sid Meier became a legend, but not so much for his ability as a visionary and programmer but because he slapped his name on every product he made or haven't really made but slapped his name there anyway.
This is rather interesting, because compared to works of
John Carmack (Wolfenstein) or
Westwood (Dune II) or
David Braben (Elite, Frontier), not many computer game developers (if any) tried to mimick Sid Meier's game concepts. Maybe its because for every possible square-tile strategy game Sid screamed "I pantented that at US office, biach!" or maybe because these concepts were unappealing due to inherent flaws in design.
Sid Meier's designs are a technological and conceptual dead-ends, and the geniuses responsible stretching it beyond civilization are few (Reynolds + ?). But even they turned away from this concept and turned to Westwood or some other
founding father for further inspiration.
There's only really one very narrow genre in which concepts seeded by Sid Meier work - Civilization X. Stuff like expanding borders, advanced diplomacy (UN), unit workshop, terrain altitude, sattelites that affect all cities, social policies, units that can become citizens... That's not really Sid. If you however treat square-tiles and cities that produce stuff as something world-changing then by all means, continue the praise.
In reality, the only thing that Sid did was to
enable Reynolds. With Civilization V there's really nothing left from the original Civ, except for the comeback of the ******ed diplomacy. Even the squares are gone and the civilopedia is worse than ever. So much for world-changing gaming concepts that stood the test of time. Brought to you by Sid Meier.
You don't have to go back that much in time, just look at Civ IV: Colonization and you are guaranteed to see that people now working at Firaxis have no clue why Reynolds made the game the way he did. And all they had to do was to copy-paste the original design into a new interface.