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Evans, for me, seems fairly clear and typical of his kind and time; he showed considerable dedication to his interests, but did not seem obsessed by them. But the other two...
I am a little conflicted over how I see Kober and Ventris. I think there is no question but that they both far overstepped the bounds of dedication into the yawning depths of obsession. Perhaps this problem called for that, but it's not healthy and it's not a guarantee of useful results.
Kober is presented to us in this book as a dedicated worker without that spark of intuition demonstrated by Ventris, but note that much of the time Kober was working with just 700 words. A statistical analysis of 700 words* written in a small alphabet would be pushing the bounds, but when written in a syllabary this tiny sample can give no more than hints. Kober took those hints and made a number of intuitive leaps that were proven correct - compared to Ventris who made many such leaps, most of them wrong ... until he was right.
Until the additional tablets (both from Knossos and Pylos) were made available, most people knew they did not have enough information for a reliable solution. Kober and Ventris knew this too, but rather than get on with life while waiting for the extra information, they continued to push and prod, hoping for revelation; for Ventris that seems part of his nature, for Kober this seems directly opposed to her professed believe in scientific method - making her dismissal of others' guesswork a bit unfair; Ventris had worked hard at his guesses, just as she had.
* Quote from chapter 4: "For every word on the tablets—the two hundred published inscriptions gave decipherers about seven hundred different words to work with—she cut a separate card."
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