No No No! Don't apologize, its a great question! And to be fair I'm absolutely against "cargo cult" programming, and my point was actually that when you are doing C++ in this type of environment, you can't always stick to a hard set of rules or the conventional wisdom. When I say guidelines, I mean just that, and not a rigorous law you MUST adhere to.
As an example: When I was working on a project for a very constrained embedded device, we needed to get some extra man-power on our team for a few sprints to help out with some functionality. One of the pieces of our system was a "debug console" I had written that allowed some interactivity with the system over a serial port. The new guy was a very sharp engineer, but he typically worked on higher level stuff than we were doing. He wanted to add some functionality to the debug console, and dutifully started writing stuff in using the C++ string handling libraries. And consequently he blew our stack budget, and we ended up very quickly rewriting part of it together.
Now, the point is he wasn't doing anything using some crazy STL functionality or Boost, and he was doing the "right" thing by handling strings using the Standard Library functionality. What we had to do for our system was actually bend the conventional knowledge ("Don't write a string handling library yourself"), because we knew exactly what we needed, and exactly what resources we had.
So perhaps I could have phrased my point better. When I say "have a disciplined team and sane coding guidelines", I don't mean a team that codes by the book, I mean a team that knows what it is doing, and knows when the rules are meant to be bent. In our case sane coding guidelines meant we did things that were against the conventional wisdom, but they were sane, because they were justified in our case based on our engineering analysis. We were certainly open to breaking / changing these guidelines but it had to be justified. (And in fact our 'guidelines' were less a set of rules about how you needed to do every last detail, and more of a set of project specific "design patterns" and a large set of lessons learned in a shared wiki page which described issues we had run in to, and justified certain design decisions that were made)
(Edit: Other examples included disabling RTTI, and completely disabling and disallowing the usage of C++ exceptions to write our own error handling. Against the common advice to use what the language gives you, but made sense for our application)
Again, no need to apologize! I could have made my point clearer, and I hope I did, but please feel free to follow up with me! I'm always looking for ways to improve :-)