Sue and Virgil integrating new sight

While reading the Sacks' piece, I became aware of the contrast between Sue's feelings about gaining stereoscopic vision and Virgil's experience with regaining sight.  Sacks addressed this difference in a general way towards the end of the "Stereo Sue" piece,  when he said: "While I liked the poetry of Sue's analogy, I disagreed with the thought, for I suspect that someone who has grown up in a completely colorless world would find it confusing, or even impossible, to integrate a new "sense" such as color with an already complete visual world."

I was also curious about Sue's nearly seamless integration of stereoscopy into her other visual percepts, and agreed with Sack's (especially after reading about Virgil) that while this shift may have been easy for Sue, it is not an experience that can be mapped on to the vision changes of others.  I wonder if it is possible that Sue had an easier experience because she simply had to fuse two separate visual fields in order to correct her vision, while sight for Virgil was an entirely unknown experience.  I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that Virgil had to learn object delineation, while Sue already had the ability to see object boundaries, even if it was on a primarily two-dimensional scale.  It was necessary for Virgil to acquire skills in object recognition if he wanted to be able to correctly interpret visual stimuli, whereas Sue had perfect recognition capacities before the experience of stereopsis.  To reiterate Sacks: Sue had a precursor; Virgil did not, and this precursor, it seems, made all the difference.

Beyond this, I also wondered whether other facets of Sue and Virgil's personalities affected the ease of their visual integration.  Sacks describes Virgil as developing a kind of "psychic blindness" (as well as visual blindness) in reaction to his surgery.  Sacks describes this psychic blindness as a bad side effect of a  surgery gone wrong, but I wonder how intentional this psychic blindness might have been, to what extent it could have been Virgil's attempt to return to the former mental state that accompanied his former visual one.  Sue, in contrast, seemed extremely adaptable to her pre- and post-stereoscopic visual states.  She was not especially bothered by her lack of normal vision (as Sacks describes it), and was not even entirely aware of what was missing, whereas Virgil was aware of what was missing and tailored his life around it. Changing Sue's vision did not change her life in any profound way, whereas changing Virgil's vision removed him from his essential zone of familiarity.

This led me to consider the effects of "experimenting" with one's vision.  Does one need a visual baseline in order to be positively affected by eyesight changes?  What is the ideal platform of vision capacity/incapacity for experimentation?