>working on a few things and not being particularly well rounded has worked for me in multiple disparate fields

arguably "well roundedness" is key to major breakthroughs in science & engineering

while most of us work on incremental improvements, the real innovation often happens on intersection of two or more disparate fields that until then were considered weakly related, and it does require knowing a bit of everything

the best scientists and engineers I know are "knowledge omnivores" and will digest anything. It does require well developed "filtering" capacity though, picking up signal from a lot of noise, and a sort of information hoarding mentality