Interesting. Great insight about being "first" in a format, or if you are not first, being first in taking a format in a new direction, progressing it.
When I think of Jhani Kaye's KOST, I think of "seamless continuity". I don't think I have ever heard a station that sounds so much the same, both throughout the day and throughout the years. As a listener who likes a lot of variety, I found it to be very irritating at the time, but I am not like most listeners and can set my personal preferences aside, and I always really respected the effort put in, the attention to detail, how he could get the entire air staff to buy in and do their thing the "KOST way" instead of whatever they did before, to make the station sound so smooth and polished. It literally brought decades of success.
I of course am not in the industry, but there is one thing I know about it - The easier it looks to do, the harder it is to actually do it. Jhani always made it look easy, which is how you know a lot of damn hard work had to go into it. Respect to a programmer who knew how to do it.