One knowledgeable individual combining the fields programming, design and usability can sometimes outperform big teams, because there is something to the way big teams decide that dillutes clear ideas and leads to inconsistencies throughout the resulting piece of software. These inconsistencies can be an problem for the user.
UX people generally may claim otherwise, but it is easy to make software without them and often the user experience is better when they are not involved. Imagine two situations. We are going to improve the user experience of the famous text editor vim. Who will make a better job:
1. Random dude who has been teaching vim to people, with some experience in creating user interfaces and a lot of experience with terminal based software
2. UX researcher armed with all the newest knowledge in usability
My money would be on the former, because the latter has a high chance of misunderstanding why people use vim in the first place. I might be mistaken, but my feeling is that in the past 15 years user interfaces have broadly been "dumbed down" or driven towards the smallest common denominator.
That is okay for software that you use once a year and where things should be self explainatory. But there is software where it is okay to have a little hurdle in the start if it means you are going to be so much more productive later. Ideally you will have both a low entrance barrier and a good usability when you use it day in, day out. Newer UX-based software is good at the former, but sucks at the latter.