Thing is, given a 'sufficiently good leader', I figure any kind of approach can be made to work, even if we have a team consisting of a deaf person, an astronau

Thing is, given a 'sufficiently good leader', I figure any kind of approach can be made to work, even if we have a team consisting of a deaf person, an astronaut and a deep-sea diver communicating exclusively via morse code. It's a bit like the many discussions we have here on HN around testing and/or static typing, or using frameworks, or full-blown IDE's versus plain text editors: it's a perfectly valid argument that given a good enough team or individual, we can do without any of this, but it doesn't really contribute or help much in many real-world situations where we don't have that luxury.