By the way, just think of the few recent pieces of software that made the most impact on industry; Clojure, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, jQuery,etc. All the works of random sole hackers, the last two pretty much standard resume pieces for any web developer. None of these guys existed on the map until they changed the industry with a Changelog. And because of that, I have every reason to believe that the next great engineer-aesthete is faceless today, and bumming around on friends' couches and handouts; not someone being cultivated with corporate endowments and backing.
I hope you're right honestly. The vision of the heroic hacker is much more appealing to me than that of big, bureaucratic, corporate research departments. Certainly the things small independent teams have accomplished lately is impressive.
I wonder though if there are some projects that just require more elaborate support structures. It's difficult for me to imagine that ghc or the scala compiler or postgresql could have been hacked together on the clojure model.
