But if things start to go bad, they will probably be the first ones to start staying late.

I think foregoing producers definitely makes this very difficult. We had some wonderful producers at Blizzard (web team) that came on and turned the team around from hours of OT every night to projects being done on time without OT except in rare cases. Leads don't have (quite) as much on their plate, devs don't get burnt out, and things just run so much better.