Yeah he did a great job at Everton, made them a solid and consistent mid-table side but he wasn't performing miracles.
I think you are splitting hairs now. It is clear that he was pound-for-pound the best manager in the league, and that was down to his meticulous approach to the job. This is something that clearly impressed Sir Alex, and made him see Moyes as a modern version of himself.
In fact, the Financial Times made it clear years ago that he was extremely forward thinking in his approach.
"Moyes, while still at little Preston North End until 2002, was reputedly the only manager outside the Premier League who bought statistics on players from the data provider Prozone. When Moyes joined Everton, he brought with him the numbers and the mindset. Probably all Premier League clubs now employ a performance analyst, but often the guy is locked up in a backroom with his laptop and never meets the manager.
"At Finch Farm, the offices of Moyes’s main performance analysts, Smith and Brown, are opposite his own. Smith says: “He is quite demanding in terms of data. In terms of managers, he is probably as into it as any.” (A measure of the grunts’ awe for Moyes is that they rarely refer to him by name – what to call him? “Moyes”? “Mr Moyes”? “David”?) Moyes will often march into the offices across the corridor firing out questions: how efficient is next Saturday’s opponent at scoring from throw-ins? What types of passes do their midfielders make? When Everton face Tottenham’s superstar Gareth Bale, Moyes wants “an assessment of where Bale is actually picking up the ball compared to the areas where you think he is working,” says Brown.
"Perhaps the greatest edge Moyes brings is by analysing videos of matches – of Everton and their future opponents. “The level that he goes through the minutiae of the video,” marvels Smith. “Stopping it, playing it again, going through it slowly, from another angle, saying, ‘Go and bring in so-and-so and see what he says about it.’ I think it’s part of why he doesn’t often get it wrong.” Brown adds: “The traditional manager, who leaves at two or three in the afternoon – he couldn’t be further removed from doing that.” Moyes has no particular ideology of how to play football. Arsène Wenger of Arsenal, say, has always striven for a fast-passing attacking game. Moyes, by contrast, tailors Everton’s style to each new opponent. He works out what the opposition does – and then tries to stop it. Before facing Manchester City, for instance, he found the positions where City’s playmaker David Silva usually receives the ball, and put men there."