I will try to continue your clay/sticks parable, but in my limited clojure experience, you seldom create a clay model, it resembles more a creation of a custom clay brick-set.

Most of the time, all of the team is either building bricks or using those bricks.

The biggest plus of using clay instead of sticks is that when you find yourself in a corner, it is easy to invent a new brick shape that fits.

The drawback is, that without the style-guide, you can easily end up with brick-shape per developer. But I see a difference between "Hey, why did you invent a new brick type again?" and "Apply one finger of pressure when doing joins."

When crisis comes and model needs to pivot urgently, there are two possibilities. Either you just need to rearrange your bricks. Or you realize there is something fundamentally wrong with your bricks, and then you create a new brick-type and carefully replace old bricks with new bricks.

Ok, programming parables are weird. I might write a more concrete example, if I have time.