I agree with your latter statement - I've worked with a few teams now, and the best output always comes from teams that have designers with good foundation know

I agree with your latter statement - I've worked with a few teams now, and the best output always comes from teams that have designers with good foundation knowledge (i.e., of the psychology of design, alignment, balance, colour, gestalt, typography, white space etc - they could be highly effective print designers as well), who work closely with developers with deep understanding of the medium, where both sides are reluctant to compromise, but understand where they need to. For the former though, I actually wish more designers had better knowledge of the "shallow and antiquated schools of thought" from the print world. A lot of that was born out of decades of iteration, and many of the toys that the web gives us aren't actually very useful for the kinds of content that many of them are tasked with publishing.