I agree completely. The truth is that there are simply techniques that have been finely crafted over decades that you are simply unlikely to discover from your own hacking. There are algorithms that are subtle and the product of pure academic research. For example, a self-taught hacker probably wouldn't even know that there are methods to build a self-balancing binary tree. This is because, in the course of your own hacking projects, you may never encounter datasets that are large enough and ill-conditioned enough for it to matter whether you used a self-balancing node insert algorithm or the standard algorithm that any clever highschool student could roll up. How many self-taught guys can code quickly and even bug-free, yet don't know that there are better algorithms for sorting than bubble-sort? These are the type of things that someone with a formal education would be aware of, even if they couldn't code the algorithms themselves or very well.

I used to think that just being a good hacker was all it took to be a good developer but the fact is that you don't know what you don't know. There are things that you are forced to learn in academic courses that you may not have chosen on your own but which end up being valuable in unpredictable ways.