Interesting...
I never realized coding projects invariably need an 'overlord' to get them to work. Or that every project needed to start from a completely bank page if I understand you correctly. Seems almost inefficient by design.
-40hz
I may have a wee bit of insight to offer here.
I "begged" myself into a Nany badge based on some highly alpha-level "components" that I was working on just before my job and therefore dev-paying income tanked.
I was dreaming of a "Super-Word-Processor" where once the "boring word crunching" left off, it had all kinds of fascinating ultra features to do nifty things never heard of before in a single program. The theory started out as this:
Word Processor. Makes documents. Yay.
But then you really wanted some other end result, and that requires more pieces most word processors don't do. But why not? With smart programmers like (say, you, but I outsourced this one), there's no reason a program couldn't do end-to-end production of the end goal.
The main reason typical word processors are what they are is because they "hit the minimax and no more".
But what I began designing as a concept was a type of "Turbo Word Processor with add-ons".
(I know, "turbo" is so '80's.)
So, the original goal was:
You take some web text, hit a bunch of options in the program, and using the CSS Zen Framework,
http://www.csszengarden.com/You could have an instant webpage in any (authorized) design you wanted.
There was more, but the summary point is that I discovered I needed one guy to do the conversion module, one guy to translate the strange html output code of a program I was using, one guy to so something else, .... and then I hired a "project manager" because I got all these components but they didn't mesh, so his job was to select the raw WordProcessor open source framework, translate the intent of the modules, then connect them to the final evolving master project.
So yeah, there's a 3001 combined IQ here, and the 1 point is mine, but once you get out of Ludum Dare, various soft needs explode.