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This seems to misunderstand the definition of heroic responsibility in the first place. It doesn't require that you're better, smarter, luckier, or anything else than the average person. All that matters is the probability that you can beat the status quo, whether through focused actions to help one person, or systematic changes. If swimmer had strong enough priors that the doctor was neglecting their duty, swimmer would be justified in doing the stereotypically heroic thing. She didn't, so she had to follow the doctors lead.
If everyone else cares deeply about solving a problem and there are a lot of smarter minds than your own focusing on the issue, you're probably right to take the long approach and look for any systematic flaws instead of doing something that'll probably be stupid. However, there's lots of problems where the smartest, wealthiest people don't actually have the motivation to solve the problem, and the majority of people who care are entrenched in the status quo, so a mere prole lacking HJPEVesque abilities benefits strongly from heroic responsibility.
And sometimes you can't fix the system, but you can save one person and that is okay. It doesn't make the system any better, and you'll still need to fix it another day, but ignoring the cases you think you can solve because you lack the tools to tackle the root of the problem is EXACTLY the kind of behaviour heroic responsibility should be warning you about.