I realised much later that the team were effectively being rewarded for having being punished prior to launch. The offsite was an apology for the grotesque demands put on them during the extended crunch.
The commitment to the product was so complete that nobody involved could see the wood for the trees, and we saw the damaging impact of reality distortion first hand.
This is where I find this 'you must have passion for your job & company' to be problematic. You get this worker cult environments where how dare someone use a competitor typer scenarios. Or managers surrounding themselves with yes men.
A bit of neutrality in job attitude is good. You still take pride in doing a good job but the pride should be in your actions, not the company/product.
Google had something really nice. Sure, it wasn't as big as Facebook, but the idea that something needs to be as big as Facebook to count as successful is incredibly harmful. Google+ was successful; it was home to lots of vibrant communities, it launched businesses, it brought people together and helped them organise cool stuff. It's just not what Google wanted it to be, and they destroyed it trying to force it to become something it wasn't.
And dropping Google+ (after dropping a number of other Google applications), has made people very distrustful about Google. This was a group of Google-loving early adopters who now distrust anything that Google does.