I agree entirely on Le Corbusier, while I love the eventual outcome of his work in many senses (aesthetically certainly), his approach to actual people was (as you say) far less humane than Alexander. Alexander I think saw himself as a part of "the people" - from what I know of Le Corbusier, I don't imagine he did.

I've not yet read The Oregon Experiment (it's in one of the waiting piles) but I've skimmed it. Funnily enough, the comparison you make around changing budgeting processes to enable smaller projects, having users working as part of planning, etc. reminds me of some of the original intents of agile before it was co-opted. For agile to work it couldn't just be isolated as software delivery - it had to change the organisations it worked with/within. I remember having just such an argument many years ago about governments building software using ostensibly "agile" approaches, and yet still requiring three-year budget approaches from the national treasury - they simply weren't compatible!

That final quote is wonderful, and I do feel the same about software in many ways - all the true wonder of computers and the things they can do for people will never really benefit everyone fully unless it spans the national, the corporate, and the personal.