I feel like I'm currently living in a gray area between those two alternatives. I'm US as the lead architect for this project. I've written much of the code, ma

I feel like I'm currently living in a gray area between those two alternatives. I'm US as the lead architect for this project. I've written much of the code, made most of the architectural decisions, and all PRs go through me. The curveball in my situation is that all of my engineer teammates are offshore of varying levels of quality. I don't really have a choice to cut all the fat because I work at a consulting firm but on a unique project where it's a joint ownership between my consulting firm and a client. The project behaves more like long-term internal project work but its the client paying us and our bills. We're incentivized to keep these green offshore guys on the payroll even though their contributions are pretty small. For whatever reason, even though the client knows they submit low-quality work, the client still wants them on the project. We've tried over and over to push the devs critical thinking skills to the level where they can take a prototype and not royally fuck it up, but they just can't seem to meaningfully push through and take ownership of a prototype. It's weird, because I do end up architecting and developing in isolation (which is sweet, honestly) but stakeholders are somehow happy enough with our throughput that they won't shell out for more US senior engineers. I guess the upshot here is that a team is only as flexible and scalable enough as the average level of talent on the team.