Plenty of people achieve many of their goals despite being completely nuts.

I haven't yet read the whole discussion, but it seems to me that it is overlooking an important component of goal-reaching ability: not being nice. It applies to at least two major examples of 'winning' discussed here, namely Hitler (wasn't nice to conquered nations, Jews etc.) and Western Europe (to native Americans etc.)

It is obvious that an agent not constrained by ethics can plan shorter / less expensive paths through reality to its desired state than an ethically-constrained agent, and it may well be that the absence of ethical constraints can compensate for agent's irrationality.