Do I detect the aroma of sour grapes here?
Yeager was undoubtably not highly educated but was clearly a very intelligent guy ot he could not have got where he did. My feelings are that he was a simply brilliant stick and rudder man and what's more one with an almost uncanny ability to judge an aircraft's limits by the seat of his pants, and go there, and come back with all the data the test engineers wanted. That is a rare skill. But he was one of the last of his ilk, time saw to that.
He was, however, overtaken by the graduate engineers and aerodynamicists as the problems of pushing the boundaries became ever more technical, even more dangerous, and also harder to judge by "feel". There is no doubt he was also something of a loose cannon at times with an almost equal disregard for military discipline as the fool who got into an F86 and dived it supersonic on it's first flight, which seems to me to be an act of supreme folly and irresponsibility. He was/is also a consumate self-publicist which seems to annoy some people in UK and Europe, but less so in US, I think, where he is still remembered as the all-american hero from the backwoods who did good in the Air Force and sold a lot of car parts on TV.
The fact is he is one of the most highly skilled pilots there has ever been and it seems a pity that on this forum, of all places, some of us see fit to run him down.
I still think that a self-powered (as opposed to gravity powered) record is still the one to admire, so leaving aside Richard Pierce (!) or those Me262s that can never be proven then Yeager is the one who takes the prize.