I don't agree with the blog's author (Charlie Stross) but I will attempt to interpret what he's trying to say. He's not advocating for a more efficient fiction

I don't agree with the blog's author (Charlie Stross) but I will attempt to interpret what he's trying to say. He's not advocating for a more efficient fiction production method. The examples he cites are slow-growth authors that don't catch fire immediately and the failure of Agile XP "pair-programming" for consistently producing fiction any faster (the 75% contributed by both writers chestnut). If you take these premises as unchangeable, he's saying that authors require a stable industry that "nurtures" their career and a ruthless capitalist Darwinism would destroy that environment. I guess an analogy would be trashing the tenured status of mathematics professors and let other measurements such as crowdsourced student voting and dollar amounts of incoming grants dictate whether those math professors would have jobs. Under that dog-eat-dog scenario, a Charlie Stross type of prediction says that mathematician Andrew Wiles wouldn't have had the luxury to think for years on proving Fermat's Last Theorem. Good work by good creators (authors, mathematicians, etc) takes years to produce and unlike a tomato that can be grown from seed to fruit in 75 days, their slow intellectual output needs a commercial environment that doesn't punish them while 2 corporations negotiate their financial differences.