Check you basket...
Some of us might be a few sandwiches short of a picnic. That doesn't bother me much but it causes my wife to emit distress calls.
I think the main contribution that the Wright brothers made was to discover an effective means of controlled flight. There had been plenty of others who had some sort of airfoil (aerofoil, whatever) and a reasonable power-to-weight ratio or else a high enough place to start from but they all came a cropper due to lack of control: Sir George Cayley's coachman, Otto Lilienthal, etc, etc.
What really got the Wrights' goat was that the then head of the Smithsonian Institution, Langley, was officially credited by the US government with being the first to achieve powered flight. (He used up a lot of money trying to fly off a houseboat moored in the Potomac River. His contraption always ended up in the drink but he argued that one should count the distance from the deck to the drink as 'flight'. The Wrights were so steamed up about this that the original Wright Flyer stayed on exhibit in London until 1947 or so.)
It is true that they tried to nail the lid down tight on the basic idea of powered flight, thus wasting a lot of time in court that should have been spent developing the early aircraft. They went after Curtiss hammer-and-tongs for patent infringement, for instance.
As a Yank working with a lot of Brits I do occasionally enjoy citing the the first man to fly in England. That would be an American, 'Colonel' Samuel Franklin Cody. It used to get pretty smoked up in our bar when the 'When I's got to hangar-flying their Shackletons so that I would just have to drop a clanger to give the rest of us a chance to be heard.