Having spent a fair bit of time thinking the same way about growing developer teams and bouncing from 1 side of the equation to the other, I've started thinking about it like leverage.
With a lot of leverage, like a requirement for sophisticated developers and powerful languages, you can get huge payoffs. The kind that are unlikely without it. But also like leverage, small, sometimes unavoidable problems can utterly destroy your efforts.
I'm not convinced that I've ever seen a big group of average developers be highly successful, and I have seen that with a small group of great developers. But I've also seen a medium sized group of above average developers completely submarined by the complexities of their language.
With a lot of leverage, like a requirement for sophisticated developers and powerful languages, you can get huge payoffs. The kind that are unlikely without it. But also like leverage, small, sometimes unavoidable problems can utterly destroy your efforts.
I'm not convinced that I've ever seen a big group of average developers be highly successful, and I have seen that with a small group of great developers. But I've also seen a medium sized group of above average developers completely submarined by the complexities of their language.