What's really weird to me is that is sure seems like non-super-famous non-rockstar teams (so not, like, Carmack & friends) in the 90s could accomplish a hell of

What's really weird to me is that is sure seems like non-super-famous non-rockstar teams (so not, like, Carmack & friends) in the 90s could accomplish a hell of a lot with maybe 1/5 as many people as the same thing would take today, and I don't know why that is. Today you give me the spec for a program that a team of a dozen, including the office manager and an intern, did in the 90s in a year, and I'll tell you you'll need 50 people and 18 months, and I won't be wrong (if anything, the time estimate will be way too short). And this isn't just me, I look at team sizes for some products and wow, the WTF factor is high. Or there'd be like a five-person team but they'd write a whole damn GUI toolkit or new language or something crazy like that in the process of building their product, and it wouldn't even take longer than doing that today with a huge team and a ton of off-the-shelf software and all our modern "productivity tools". I'm not really sure what changed, though.