Nah, anyone can do advanced texturing, and tbh, behe and sirartturi are a lot better than me. All you need are the proper tools.
Behe and I use Carrara (I highly recommend this prog, it's winsauce), I think sirartturi switches back and forth between carrara and some other program.
Generally the lot of us do a lot of post editing in photoshop, so it's not like what carrara spits out is the final product, but it's close enough. A program that might be simpler to use (and cheaper assuming you're allergic to torrents) is L3DT. It's $30 bucks for the full version, and if you take the time to learn it (it really isn't hard, the learning curve is fairly gentle) you can do some really cool stuff with it.
For example:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... hill+basin
Oh hell, all the screens are missing because it was on unknown files originally (UF was a spring file host that died a few years back), well you can download it and take a look here:
http://springfiles.com/show_file.php?id=274
I've done TONS of maps with l3dt and it is a great program if you take the time to learn it properly.
Other lesser talked about programs are world machine (Tbh I don't care for it much, but it can do some sweet heightmaps, but I don't particularly care for it's erosion style) and SME (SME stands for Spring Map Editor. It's pretty basic, but more or less functional - Spikedhelmet has produced some really pretty maps with it).
Interesting factoid, I still run all my heightmaps through l3dt even though I use carrara to lay the base texture.
