As someone who aced chem but nearly failed the labs, he seems remarkably skilled to me, so you saying "horrible" and "average" really surprises me -- but obviously I have nothing to judge by, never having been exposed to anything near that level of chem work except for his videos.
As you allude to, I wonder how much of the "it didn't work, so I had to try something different" is for YouTube -- if every project worked the first time it would be boring.
