Tom - I think you were joking (at least in part), but when I was working on television programs (like golf course design-construction, a collaborative endeavour) I found the downside for me was that, with so many people/sets of eyes involved, nothing unexpected or out of the ordinary had any chance of even breathing, let alone of coming to life. No so-callled "crack" in either the foundation or the structure itself went unnoticed, and not a single one was left un-filled (all in the name of "doing it right", and driven by the desire that each person had to, in the positive sense, "contribute to the process" and in the negative sense "save the day").
What did we get in the end? A perfectly polished, perfectly constructed, "piece of work" -- just what the producer and the client wanted, but for me almost completely devoid of the originality and personality and individuality of a living, breathing document. As I've mentioned before, I admire your ability to walk that knife edge between satisfying the client and satisfying yourself, between your duty to sustaining the business and your duty to the art-craft of gca at its highest level. I wasn't able even to figure out that knife-edge, let alone walk it.
We of course discuss archuitects past and present all the time around here, but this ability -- and even before that, the desire/intention --to identify and then consistently walk that knife-edge plays, I believe, a greater role in the nature and quality of an architect's overall body of work than anything else, including the quality and nature of the sites he/she has had to work with.
I don't know how Mike D works, but if he is getting that "simpler" and raw-ish look as Ally suggests then he is doing many things right, including probably not doing too much! My knowledge of the subject is limited, and I can't even begin to guess "what might've been", but when i think back to the golden age, the only course that strikes me as having been truly enhanced by the "all the bases covered' and "micro-managing" approach was NGLA.
Peter