I was specifically responding to what I construed as "this will allow a critical mass of smart people to emerge/collaborate": due to people's finite attention s

I was specifically responding to what I construed as "this will allow a critical mass of smart people to emerge/collaborate": due to people's finite attention span and inability to keep track of too many different people, there is a natural limit to the size of a community anyway, and it is possible that "elite" communities run into this bound before they achieve critical mass (which is rather nebulous anyway, but I interpret this as "genius happens".) I'm really not trying to misconstrue your point, BTW; if it didn't interest me, I'd have stopped responding long ago, and I have better things to do than trolling.