Ha ha ha ha.
Sorry. Just looking at my track record as a journalist, and comparing it to your comment. It made me snicker.
Um, no.
I have had lots of projects fail. Some were my fault. Some were management. Some were external. Plenty of reasons.
My point is that the existence of the team being ever-so-awesome does not necessarily have a correlation with its success. Just as actors can tell you about working on a movie with other actors where everyone felt creative and warm-and-fuzzy towards each other, and it has no influence on whether the movie is a commercial success.
Is that really what you thought this was about?
There's a big difference from someone being semi-competent or having a "dial-it-in" attitude and someone who's just not up to the rest of the people around him. With the former, team members resent the individual: "Why am I working so hard when you can't be bothered? I just have to pick up the slack" -- and that creates dissension and a management nightmare.
With Elliot (and the many team members I've known like him), it's obvious to everyone that he's doing the best he can; he's just dumb (relative to the others around him). He can be frustrating, but it's not because he has a bad attitude; quite to the contrary. HE WANTS TO HELP. In a healthy team, everybody does his best to find a way for him to do so.
The casual handshake nature of most barters opens up the chance of every project-gone-bad story occurring in your business, such as finger-pointing about product specs, timetables, etc. As with any contract, if you can point to the agreement (which can be as simple as "here's an email message to record what we agreed upon today; let me know if you see anything untoward"), both sides know what's expected.
Because... what if you're unhappy with the service? In a barter, what if you already consummated your part of the process (you did the tax return) but the other party was substandard (you hated the photographer's images). If you were paying cash, you'd withhold payment or otherwise ask for the other party to fix the problem. With a barter... it's sticky. It shouldn't be, but it is. Particularly when the nature of the delivery is "...when the customer is happy." (Imagine the storyline that begins, "Dammit those photos were just what he asked for!")
Oh, and plenty more.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.