Yeah, that is sad. As the others said, some players just don't mesh well or don't understand the campaign.
Sometimes the problems can be papered over. 20 years ago when I moved to Florida I joined a group and played a female wizard character (I'm a guy.) The GM and other players thought this strange, they weren't used to people playing opposite-gender characters, but it was a common thing with my last game group. They felt better when I played the character like "Mrs. Doubtfire." (Still though, about 1/3 of the spells I had chosen for the character were useless in the campaign, just not the GM's style of play. In the previous game they would have been very useful. I think it's often true: we do try to refight the previous war.)
I'm not sure how I would have handled Trace's player. As I mentioned before I am not totally against what he tried to do. He sounds like a younger me, in ways. But...