I'm really really glad you mentioned this, it's something I wanted to touch on in the blog post but it was getting too side-tracked. I'm definitely in the same boat as you, my previous job used to be in an open office environment (at two different co-working places so it was LOTS of different teams worth of open office environments) and my lunch hour would be the only alone time I got.

Everything changed when I started at Stack though. As an introverted person I don't always want to be alone, but being alone is what makes me "recharge" so to speak. What's nice about having a private office all the time is I can choose to communicate with other people or not, there's always long-running Google Hangouts I can drop into if I just want to talk to another human being, or I can choose to be alone by myself for the entire day. Lunch though, is the only time I get face to face with my coworkers and it turns out I kind of miss that from being in an open office environment.

There's lots of people here that work on different teams and do drastically different things than me which would make it so I wouldn't communicate with them at all if I didn't simply grab lunch at the office and sit down at a random table.

I definitely agree with you that lunch as a team should never be mandatory though, it's asinine to steal an extra hour or whatever from everyone at your company with the goal of "morale" or whatever they want to say behind it. I'm super happy with the setup at Stack though, it works pretty well.