Why is this a problem? You can replace meeting time with time reading specs / requirement if you’d like. Point is you need some constant amount of time to understand the problem domain. If 2 people need to do that then that’s twice the time needed.
Doing it in a meeting where everyone has different questions, tangents and other cruft that you have to sit through is extremely inefficient.
Additionally, everyone can focus on producing and consuming information in the downtime between focus-work sessions, without interrupting flow at someone else's convenience.
In all cases, quality documentation is more likely to produce accurate information transfer with less time wasted by everyone involved.
Fix your management and you'll be able to hire part time easily.
It depends more on the personalities, values and organization of the workplace and the team — for any size, if more than 20% of people involved need to spend more than 2 hrs/week in meetings — it is an organizational/ops issue, not an inherent feature of the work.
> more foreign the domain the more time is needed to coordinate work
More foreign to who? If it is foreign to individual team members, then it is a problem of insufficient onboarding/training material and process, poor documentation, or under-qualified hire.
The only way I see real value is if you’re the sold dev/architect or if you can come in and confidently pick up tickets and they’re properly scoped and documented.
If you need developers to spend so much time ideating and figuring out how and what to build, you’re mismanaging those developers imo.