I think they followed a bell curve. They were all legitimate science - I don't pretend that this was a world leading lab, but it was a decent one and we mostly

I think they followed a bell curve. They were all legitimate science - I don't pretend that this was a world leading lab, but it was a decent one and we mostly published in the field's main few journals. I don't believe the volume had any negative impact on the quality, if anything it made it better because metrics being what they are we had good grant money coming in and got good people and equipment. And as the sibling pointed out, all of us students had great opportunities to write and submit papers and conferences. I had peers in grad school with very conservative supervisors that didn't want to publish very much (I can think of one prof in particular who was undoubtedly a very good researcher and infrequenty published very good papers). This can be a disservice to students who don't get the same experience, and it's an argument for why publication count is a good metric (even though it's obviously flawed)