[librish]

I agree that there's no good data to back this up, it seems really hard to collect. Unless you have a rock solid idea on how to measure productivity? The rest of your post is essentially "I hesitate to ask, but are you bad at your job?"

No, it's more that when you're venturing outside your usual territory it can be so much quicker to ask your teammates who are area owners.

If I'm modifying widget X that John built, and I encounter something non-obvious, I can spend an hour figuring out why that was, or I can ask John sitting next to me, and he can usually unblock me in about 30 seconds.

When I help people get up to speed in code I've written I usually say something along the lines of "if you get stuck and you've spent 5 minutes trying to figure it out, please ask me about it".

[chank]

So coming back, your main problem still seems to be the unresponsiveness of your teammates when you can't force them to respond by being directly in front of them? If you're teammates are really that bad at responding then perhaps they are "bad at their job". Just about every job description usually has something about ability to communicate included in it.

So basically trying to fix one problem with another one. Can't please everyone 100% of the time.