I found remote team code reviews to be much more objective. That way most people aren't worried they'll shame someone in person and they give better and more useful feedback.
The energy you speak of, while very real, is not related to the quality of the work that will follow.
But design is a different beast. Collaborative design of complex systems has a few stages. There's a rapid prototyping stage where 3 people in a room bouncing ideas off of each other and scribbling is better than anything else I've done. Then you circle back with a document that formalizes things (like an RFC). The second part can be done with a distributed group. But the first part is better when people are close to each other. You see this even in distributed groups like OSS projects. They have conferences and work sprints where the maintainers can be colocated for a bit and brainstorm about things in person.
I too collaborate with colleagues in different time zones but design and tons of brain-storming is not the main focus of our work. When we need to do that, we do long video calls with shared diagrams -- or we just scribble with the mouse. Works quite alright 99% of the time.
I agree that the rapid initial stages of a project are best done in person but failing that, there are replacements, and they are not as bad as many in this mega-thread claim.
And that's just one reason to disfavor a remote-only environment.
What other reasons do you see to disfavor a remote-only environment?
In my experience, this need arises very frequently in complex systems with evolving requirements.
Our company offered us to sometimes reconvene physically and discuss such things but since our team are all family men, it hasn't happened yet. But it is a really good idea and we should reconsider actually doing it sometime.
This is an excellent argument for annual all-hands retreats for distributed companies.
The whole idea of agile is to design iteratively and reactively, but you're throwing that away.
Its still, at least to me, markedly less productive, than an in-person meeting.
Like I said, conferences, summits, etc. These are done for a reason. Not to mention that there's some research I've seen that suggests that places like Bell were so successful because they cultivated happenstance interactions between smart people that don't happen in distributed environments.
My current belief is that a 95% remote team works, you do need in-person opportunities, the more the better, but at least once in a project can be enough.
Honestly, you can collaborate and do almost everything remotely. What does lose a bit is team building, you have to go a bit out of your way to build rapport (but it´s also doable).