While I think that Frank Hebert was a good writer and deep thinker, I would hesitate well short of 'literary genius.' It is, in fact, his limitations as a writer that have prevented cogent adaptations. Denis Villenueve may, in fact, be the genius needed here.

And so we construct this battle of titans, Lucas v Herbert, whom neither was/is very genius: Lucas created a... melange... of Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers and Akira Kurosawa, inflected with Hebert amidst an insane jealousy for the raw talent of his friends, Spielberg and Coppola. And therefore Herbert shines, but only in comparison.

And, not for nothing, it's only in our world of grafted on intellectual property--in our sandlot, zero-sum, moralist amorality-- that 'stealing' is a crime in art. If it is a crime, then modernism, all of it, is guilty. T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was a blatant middle finger to and 'theft' of Rudyard Kipling and almost everything Picasso did he did in argument with Rembrant, from whom he plucked imagery wholesale, mercilessly and continuously.

Or, said another way, everything old is new again.