This post reminded me of this interview with Jeremy Howard, multiple-times winner of Kaggle data prediction contest. The article is titled "Specialist Knowledge Is Useless and Unhelpful" and includes this:

Q. How have experts reacted?

A. The messages are uncomfortable for a lot of people. It's controversial because we're telling them: "Your decades of specialist knowledge are not only useless, they're actually unhelpful; your sophisticated techniques are worse than generic methods."

It's only anecdotal evidence, but still; I think that becoming a domain expert always comes at the cost of certain inertia in thinking. "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like nail". An abacus expert may have spent years honing his techniques, but that would not help him much in a contest against someone equipped with a computer. The expert would be better off if had switched to the computer himself, which was psychologically hard, because he had so much more (subjectively) to lose, compared with unskilled novices.