There was a nice approach described in the Pragmatic Programmer book if I'm not mistaken.
The idea was to construct development teams in a way similar to the surgery teams - one lead developer, one assistant developer (these two "adult" and very good), and a 3-4 other people who
's job is to make the life easier for the main devs - someone to manage documentation, someone else to do detailed testing, one average dev to do the simple and boring stuff, and so on.
That way, in a company of a 100 devs, you'd need 15-30 super-smart developers (who don't need methodologies and scaffoldings), and the remaining 75 just junior/average specialists doing specific tasks and fitting into the structures provided by seniors.
Chapter 3 of "The Mythical Man Month" is titled "The Surgical Team" and describes just this. If you enjoyed the Pragmatic Programmer, I recommend The Mythical Man Month as well.
The idea was to construct development teams in a way similar to the surgery teams - one lead developer, one assistant developer (these two "adult" and very good), and a 3-4 other people who 's job is to make the life easier for the main devs - someone to manage documentation, someone else to do detailed testing, one average dev to do the simple and boring stuff, and so on.
That way, in a company of a 100 devs, you'd need 15-30 super-smart developers (who don't need methodologies and scaffoldings), and the remaining 75 just junior/average specialists doing specific tasks and fitting into the structures provided by seniors.