I was very interested to see that the team they pitched included only 11 people, including designers and illustrators. Only three programmers ('One chief programmer and two junior programmers').

Am I correct in thinking that a team this size would be considered closer to an indy game in 2016? I am not a game developer but this seems like a very stark comparison to the current landscape / size of software teams (not just limited to games).

No, an indie game is 1-3 people. Often 1 programmer, 1 artist, 1 musician.

It's more flexible than that. A lot of indies are just one guy, but you certainly see small studios of 6-12 people doing e.g. Kickstarters.

I work in a game studio, I still can't wrap my head around one guy doing it all.

My startup now has about 25 coders doing what 2-3 of us did for a few years. I'm still not sure what everyone does. We are actually moving quite a bit slower these days.

For the time, that was a pretty good sized team. Id did most of their early games with Carmack, Romero, Abrash, and a few different artists/level designers.

First release was December 31, 1996. So nearly 3 years, instead of 1!

Though I doubt they started working immediately after pitch. I was also very interested in this point since my SO is a project manager and it rubs off.

So for all we know it could have been pitched in Q4 1994 and finished in Q1 1996.

The way they talk about their Dynamic Random Level Generation suggests they probably already somewhat developed it (and probably other aspects of the game) as a proof of concept.