It's all true though. Do whatever you want, all that matters is that you do it well - you just can't simplify a good software engineer down to techniques like these.
I recommend reading this piece from a guy who studied software development methodology for over 20 years: http://alistair.cockburn.us/Characterizing+people+as+non-lin...
We standardize around protocols, frameworks, programming languages, etc because adding constraints and processes make a problem much easier to solve.
If not scrum, what? Where do you start?
There are plenty of methodologies and tools that can replace or complement Scrum.
>This paper outlines the work I reviewed that made it clear to me that ‘people’ really are a first-order, and not incidental, project success driver, the characteristics I currently use as predictors.
My personal experience is similar - methodologies can make things incrementally better for a team, but cannot do anything with the ‘people’ factor.
Using only few features might slow development a little in the small, and you might even make more errors in the small while developping. But you can FIX them.
I realize this is not hard science, and I have no motivation to do any on it, like collecting and bending statistics. But as long as all people have to say "XY is not good or bad", "things will get better", "XY has just a very steep learning curve", "you just didn't dance the right dance" and all evidence seems to suggest otherwise, then you've just lost the argument. End of story.
When you need partial updates to state in the case of an error, then you're in trouble. When you have multiple transactions to coordinate, but no distributed transaction coordinator, you're in trouble (but you are anyway whether you use exceptions or not). The more state you need to preserve in an error case, the worse exceptions are for your use case. Ideally, exceptions are never caught except at the topmost loop: server request dispatcher, UI event handler, or command line driver. When execution must continue with recovery, exceptions are an inferior tool.
And not just simple programs and short scripts; very complex programs, as long as they keep state in a transactional store, and a request has approximately the same lifetime as the transaction.
Which likely doesn't even try to handle any errors, and may actually be a bad, faulty program - the edge cases just don't matter that much for businesses. Maybe an e-mail will be sent out twice in a few circumstances, etc: nobody cares.
Transaction management is implemented in the database server, and very likely that doesn't employ exceptions. And more complexity is implemented by the OS (the "process server" if you will) - if your program dies it specifies how to handle the condition, etc. Another part of complexity is dealt with by the language runtime, for example garbage collection - no exceptions to be seen there.
The thing that serves responses to requests is a program. And it's not just a "simple, dirty request handler script," it's often enormously complex. Entire companies exist with their product exposed via HTTP APIs.
The reason you don't see exceptions in databases, operating systems, etc is because they're often written in C++, which has notoriously wonky semantics around exceptions, or C, which doesn't have exceptions at all.