Teaching someone who is bad at coding means fixing 2-5 years of mistakes. Teaching someone who is poor at communication means fixing 20+ years of mistakes.
Plus, it's easier to convey coding mistakes than social mistakes since it's more difficult to communicate the large amounts of unwritten social rules.
If you take 20 programming novices, maybe one will be as good as Rodrigo at coding after 5 years of intensive practice.
I'll take a team player who has room for improvement almost every time over some rockstar who can't take constructive criticism.
Not that we only have these two choices, but the truly great AND nice are kind of rare compared to the wanna-bes who think being an amateur professor at work translates into business value.
On the other hand, it's very hard to give someone a list of concrete things that will make them a better programmer. I suspect if you tried, you'd end up with very subjective things like 'strive for readable code' etc.
I'm not saying teaching someone coding is easy, but at least you can see some progress on this, which make both side much easier.
I ended up deciding the people skills would be easier to teach because, frankly, the culture of the field demands a lot more in terms of technical skills than it does in people skills. The bar is set a lot lower for people skills among developers than it is for programming skills, and in my opinion, pulling someone from "horrible" to "competent" communication is easier than pulling someone from "ok" to "awesome" as a developer. But the truly skilled, in either area, are hard to find and worth their weight in gold.
To me, this implies that programming is harder to teach and learn; though you could also take it to mean that Rodrigo is that much more obtuse regarding communication.
This, I think, puts Gabriella slightly over the bar -- she sees value in being more like Rodrigo, but it doesn't appear that Rodrigo sees value in Gabriella.