Interesting perspective. What I'm hearing you say is that it's more often a crappy process and poor relationship management that leads to suboptimal results. That's kind of like saying hiring good people and investing in them in always a solid strategy, if you have the resources to do so. If your resources are too tight to hire good people, or you neglect the good people on your team, you're gonna have a bad time. It's hard enough to build good software when your team is capable!