Thanks for your insight. We'd probably have one team per project, with hopefully the right number of people on each team, staffed based on the LOEs we build during the architecture design phase. Dev team size would probably be 3-6, plus creative, mgmt, qa, etc...

I like the idea of the research project paradigm, as long as we remember the stricter timelines and higher consequences of failure:)

I have to disagree with the QA thing though. It's important to test every flow, in every major browser, on every major OS. It's also important to see what happens when you leave this field blank and submit the form, or put in bad data here, or use the back button and try to do something again. When you're delivering a multi-million dollar project, it can't go out the door and break on IE6 or Firefox, or break whenever someone enters a zip code that doesn't exist.

PS: there are TONS of really really high buck ATG contracts available all over the US right now. If you're interested I know a ton of companies who are dying to find an experienced ATG dev (back end or front end), so feel free to email me.