I was going to object to your "finger on the pulse of every detail of their project", because as complexity increases, it eventually becomes overwhelming and to

I was going to object to your "finger on the pulse of every detail of their project", because as complexity increases, it eventually becomes overwhelming and too difficult to understand, and you have to construct intermediate representations to handle the complexity - that is, a form of modularity, not for coding it, but just for understanding it. But then I saw your quote here, about the need to understand it, and the having very few parts makes that possible, by limiting the complexity.