Many intellectuals (like me) find it hard to focus long on a particular topic, and easily succumb to weak excuses to read widely and try out new fields. I suspect your personality largely determined your history here.

I don't say you're wrong, but the obvious next question is what kind of realization would lead you to focus long on a particular topic despite your personality, why the young Eliezer lacked that realization, and even whether that would have been appropriate (considering how things turned out).

I mean, if you'd told the young Eliezer that, he would have fired back that extreme specialization was an error produced by poor incentive structures in academia. Relative to his state of knowledge about not knowing which path to go down and specialize extremely in, this was a lucky mistake for him to make - though it was still a mistake, because you can't stay permanently in a state of shallow exploration, and depth isn't just an incentive failure.

My own change of opinion on this subject dates to my Bayesian Enlightenment, when my opinion changed about a lot of things, making it hard to untangle; but I would mostly chalk it up to reading E.T. Jaynes and seeing a higher level of precision in action.