I think you might be confused about which character you are celebrating:
According to the in-game unit tooltips, the Kobold Shoveler is a caricature/parody of
Vice President of Blizzard, Frank pearce.
He is represented as a kobold with a shovel, presumably because he is "good at cutting through the chaff and getting tasks done."
Conversely, according to in-game unit tooltips the
Sammy! unit is a caricature/parody of
Lead artist, Sam Didier. He is portrayed as a flaming error cube of doom because elsewhere in the game files there appears to be a large, generic cube roughly the size of a farm that simply has the face of Samwise on it, suggesting that during the game's development this error cube was probably displayed whenever a model failed to load (similar to how the production versions of Warcraft III sometimes show checkered generic cubes when resources fail to load). Presumably, by putting his face on it whenever something would fail to load, the Lead Artist could ensure that anyone on the game's team who was testing would know to report to him when they encountered the "Sammy Cube" during the game (which would indicate an art file resolution problem).
So, I bring this up because according to my understanding as a layman from the outside, the
Kobold Shover is not meant to represent the character of Sammy and to the extent that we want to celebrate and honor the original authors of everything that Warcraft III is, it would probably be best to do so by not confusing these concepts.
Edit: here are there faces from quick internet searches next to the corresponding caricatures:
Edit 2:
As an additional note, in-game the attack ability of the
Sammy! unit is to throw the classic fireballs of the Archmage, loaded as a standard art file for an attack, whereas the attack of the
Kobold Shoveler unit is nothing special but the shoveler unit also has
Chain Lightning as a skill. Over the past week or so, I attempted to reprogram the
Chain Lightning skill using my own code outside of Warcraft III and in order to get the flashes of light and the lightning bolts between units and the bouncing bolt delays, this was actually a somewhat involved (albeit fun) technical programming effort. If you think about it, the
Chain Lightning skill is not simply an art file but a complex interaction between the art and the game engine to produce that bouncing bolt effect.
So, it would not surprise me at all if the choices in these cases were intentional, suggesting that the "Powerful programmer" tooltip for Frank Pearce might mean he was the kind of person who could synthesize together all of the software necessary for Chain Lightning to work, whereas the "Good at concept art" quality of Samwise might be why his unit uses a basic attack but with the well-made fireball art asset that is reused by the Archmage and the Orc Warlock and the Red Drake and so many others, because it is a well-conceived and reusable piece of art. However, this last part is merely my own speculation/conjecture about the stuff in the game data, since we do not have individual attributions regarding the reasoning behind the abilities and stats of these units.
Pending
