[andreiursan]

Exactly my feeling and I also feel that sometimes we underestimate the "ability and efficiency" of small teams. I start to believe that a small core team (not to read few contributors) can have a larger impact than an organization.

[bztzt]

certain core systems components are often developed by small teams or individuals even within large organizations. the .net GC was written/maintained by 1 dev for a long time (Patrick Dussud, later Maoni Stephens), the Windows thread scheduler was written and maintained by Dave Cutler over many releases, etc.

some development efforts are just really hard to scale out.