I worked on OLPC, and wouldn't assign much fault to Yves (although there was a heavily publicized hand crank on the side of the first designs that turned out to

I worked on OLPC, and wouldn't assign much fault to Yves (although there was a heavily publicized hand crank on the side of the first designs that turned out to fail to a few minutes of serious thought). Like you're imagining, the sort of people whose primary talent is to acquire funding through exciting demonstrations end up hiring people who are good at creating exciting demonstrations, as a correlation. The MIT Media Lab (where OLPC originated) was all about exciting demonstrations. Other "exciting" agencies were involved: Pentagram owned the UI/UX design work despite, I think, never having worked on software design/development before. (In OLPC's case I think all of this turned out surprisingly well, but people will disagree. It's easy to say "oh they should have used Android/iOS" before realizing that neither existed at the time.)