The research community was "an arguing community", and knew how to argue "in good ways" (i.e. no personal attacks, only trying to illuminate the issues, etc.) This worked pretty well almost always ... (The weekly meetings were not for being creative, but for discussion ...)

Let me respectfully disagree with your contention. The point that is missed is not what the hardware could do, but what can you do without optimizing. It is very very hard to put on the optimization hat without removing the design hat, and once you've removed the latter you are lost.

The key to the Parc approach was to be able to do many experiments in the future without having to optimize. (There was a second part to this "key" but I'll omit it here)