Talk about rationalizing after the fact! If Emacs had autocomplete, you'd be touting it as a must-have. A hack? How so? Encourages people to write code that relies on it? Are you kidding?

Autocomplete is a great tool that helps you write code faster, especially on large projects where you may be unfamiliar with APIs (for example) written by other developers.

I think that a certain degree of insulation from 'corporate' or 'other management' or the 'insane seesaw that is discussions with senior management about changing priorities and potential changes to already ongoing projects' is good.

My experience, having taken over teams where there was no insulation from these (normal) vagaries of software development projects, is that once some insulation, and the resulting focus and direction was in place, productivity and job satisfaction was up by orders of magnitude.

If individual contributors are never sure what's next, and even if the thing they are working on is the right thing, it's fair to say that you're very likely to see very low productivity.

This obviously doesn't mean that your ideas about the 'life of every department' aren't valid, just that they need to be tempered by an appropriate level of focus, and, yes, insulation.