Why having a baby who is a bad sleeper early on might be good in the long run

So here is my newest theory*:

If you have a baby who is a really bad sleeper during the first months this may actually be good in the long run, because you will be forced to address and work through sleep issues early in your child's life.

Here is the sequence of events as they happened in my family:

1. my son did not regularly sleep for more than 2 hours at a time for the first four months of his life
2. by the time he was four months old we were all so sleep deprived and miserable that we felt we had to make a big change and we did some sleep training (Ferber style)
3. a week after we started the sleep training everyone was getting so much more sleep, including my son who was happier and better rested. He started taking long naps and only waking up 1x per night
4. at 15 months old he sleeps really well for naps and sleeps through the night from 7:30pm-6:00am (apart from the occasional night when he is sick or teething) 

Now I don't know what it's like to have a young baby who is a "good sleeper", but I do know a few people with older babies who still need to coax their children to sleep each night. A case in point is a friend of mine who was still rocking her baby to sleep when he was eleven months old. Or another mom who still had to breastfeed her baby to sleep every night when he was two years old. There is nothing wrong with doing these things as long as everyone is happy doing them, but this is not always the case.

This post is not intended to encourage people to try sleep training or to criticize certain methods of getting your baby to sleep. My motto is do whatever works for your family. But I am hoping if there are people out there with young babies who are eligible for the "worst sleeper ever" prize you will see that there might be a silver lining to your situation.

At least in my case I am sure that if my son was only waking up 1x or 2x a night at four months old I would have felt no need to do sleep training. But since he was waking up on average about 4x times a night we were desperate and when he was old enough we tried the sleep training.

* As always my theories are based on limited anecdotal evidence.