Not just that, but he feels that designers and programmers should be seperate as designers hold the programmers back. He felt that John Carmack's continuous changes to the engine slowed down the progress of the design team. Now, in the present, its become apparent that the opposite is now true. Not saying I agree with the article though. You can't write a game engine without a goal in mind.
Designers come up with that goal.
You can't just come up with an engine out of the ether and throw a design around it, which is why games still take a lot of engineering effort even with licensed engines. That's the point of a game team , to work together with a common goal. As you may remember , Sony had initially said that it would ship 2 million PS2's by year's end. Due to manufacturing difficulties, this number was lowered to 1.3 million by Christmas. The plan was to start with 500,000 in October and ship 100,000 each week to make those numbers.