Borrowing notions from chess, you're talking about winning by direct
attack, possibly with brilliant sacrifices along the way, while I see
things more as a positional game, accumulating small advantages,
manoevring against enemy weaknesses. You're Mikhail Tal, I'm Jos?é
Capablanca. ;-)
Your statement assumes both approaches can/do lead to victory.
That is precisely what I am not sure of.
One person posted here saying that running Emacs on Windows led him to
drop Windows for GNU/Linux. In that case, the Windows support in
Emacs did lead to victory. Perhaps it has done so in other cases too.
If so, maybe it is effective.
But just using Emacs and other free programs on Windows is not
victory.