That is pretty much the same way that I remember it as well. The interesting dichotomy is that the NeXT 'cabal' as it were, primarily, the code/library developers as was I, and James was primarily language design. But the group was small enough that everyone had an opinion, and it often came up "well Objective C does it this way..." or "C++ does it this way ...". James was always a minimalist and Bill Joy (who was in Aspen working on the 'self' language) was always pushing the edge of what you could express in a language.