I concur. Very little "science" is done here. The kid cobbled together a cookbook "fission" reactor and then hawked it until he won somewhere. The disregard for anything but winning, the derivative nature of the work, the hurt feeling caused by "the man keeping him down" all reek of self promotion and playing the system show me an excellent and lucrative future in the status quo. But that is the whole point, isn't it?

I don't know if I can agree with the statement "but always leads to more problems in the long run". I would suggest that all law ultimately grow out of a formalisation of the concepts of "justice" formed in acts of "vigilanteism". I would suggest that actions like this actually will force the "proper channels" to actually develop proper disincentives to this behavior.