He’s probably right – there are no shortcuts …
I agree with most of his points about teamwork. Especially below point is perhaps well articulated. I have also read similar stats elsewhere e.g. in People Powered book says something on similar line but in different context.
Open source is built by exceptional individuals, and tweaked by everyone else. A small group of prolific programmers do the hard job of building 80% of the code, and a crowd of other programmers take care of the 20%, comprising usually highly specific bug fixes, documentation improvements, issue reporting and outreach.
This 80-20 rule is also known as the Pareto principle and it permeates the internet. Another similar principle is the 1%-9%-90% rule, which says that in internet communities, 1% of users are active creators, 9% are occasional contributors, and 90% are lurkers. The exact numbers vary from case to case, but it stands true that lurkers are approximately an order of magnitude more than occasional contributors, who in turn are an order of magnitude more than active creators.