Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that coherent vision and a prior design are NOT equivalent. Obviously, I cannot know what was going through the head of ESR when he wrote the original essay, but what I've always taken from it is that a priori design is inherently inflexible, prone to becoming disconnected from reality, and ultimately less inviting to creativity. If the suggestion of the article is that the only way to retain quality i…
Brooks spends some time discussing these issues in the book, and I'm pretty much aligned with him: Nobody belives in "a priori design" and I somehow doubt that anybody did. Brooks points out that the original publication of the "waterfall model" was meant as "how not to..." and people got that wrong. But cathedrals are not about a priori design, they are about style, elegance, economy of means and coherency of design…
ESRs original prototype for the "Bazaar" was Linux. Do you feel that Linux is lacking in coherency of design? You refer to the dot-com bubble, but the problem with the bubble wasn't, I think, that it was the "Bazaar". Indeed, I don't think the dot-com bubble of the late 90s was characterized by much open source development at all!
It was, rather, consumed with "flashiness" and "wow factor". I definitely see the continued obsession with these things as a problem. I would say that, for example, much of the obsession with Node.js today is a consequence of this obsession. But that isn't a Bazaar.
It's a disco.