Definitely not too young and been in IT for 30 years.
Personally I loved Rage and it worked out the box on my PC, but then I've an old Nvidia card and not a new ATI card where ATI screwed up on their driver releases. I fail to see how id can be blamed so much for a bad PC port when the biggest issues where caused by ATI releasing a driver with the wrong .dll's in it!
I'll repeat, the game was very playable and looked great on my PC from day of install - my rig is NOT a top of the range, in fact my Nvidia card I think is THE min spec card listed on the box! A couple of tweaks to the config file and unless I span 180 really fast I never saw any texture popping.

Yes Rage wasn't great, but it was very playable and I completed it 3 times before moving on to Skyrim for 100s of hours. I will say this. Skyrim is a 100 times bigger in scope etc than Rage, but during all my play time with Rage it NEVER crashed to desktop once!! Skyrim has crashed to desktop so many times I've lost count, it's also produced a bluescreen of death 3 times - actually the first time I've seen that on Windows 7!

In terms of graphics, I loved Rages views and vista and texture on the NPC's etc was great, some game world objects and surfaces looked crap but then I've never played a game yet where there wasn't some surface or texture that looked low res because it was wrapped around some object strangely. The fact that Rages views had no repeating textures was really noticeable when switching to Skyrim! still I dread to think of the install size of Skyrim if the world was done using a Mega Texture!

I know it's fashionable now to bash id, but Rage ( at least on most Nvidia setups ) didn't suck - was fun - looked great.

Back on Topic:

Sad to hear Timo is leaving, was really looking forward to playing Rage again natively on Linux
Was actually surprised Rage started and ran using wine on Linux, just was not playable at the same res as on my Windows 7 install. I'm sure that a native port would be very playable. ( just as it is for Doom3 and ET:QW ).