I quite agree, Mike. I certainly don't agree with everything Ken Rockwell says in his article, but I still think that it's worth reading - especially by novice photographers who think that just owning an expensive camera will automatically make them a "good" photographer, because there are some very worthwhile nuggets of advice in there.
I am also a member of the Ansel Adams fan club, and I think that what makes a good photographer, more than anything, is mastering the technique that Adams called "visualization" - in essence, learning to "see what the camera sees", rather than what the human eye (and, more importantly, the brain) sees. Once you've got that, you're well on your way.
(Incidentally, the statement in Rockwell's article that I do take a very strong stand against is:
...everyone knows that Photoshop can be used to take any bad image and turn it into a masterpiece...
No No NO! You can use
PS to turn a good image into a masterpiece, or an average image into a good one, but a bad image is always a bad image, no matter what you do to it.)