The thing that matters is how well the team works. This is true to a point, but is exacerbated by the current fashion for building software in ways that depend

The thing that matters is how well the team works. This is true to a point, but is exacerbated by the current fashion for building software in ways that depend on very fine-grained collaboration around small tasks (and, more generally, the idea that teamwork is the only valid way of working on many problems). Coarser grained approaches are possible, and it's not too hard to find examples of them succeeding (e.g. many of the more traditional open source projects).