I had a job where my boss expected our small group of consultants to maintain this "talk to clients a bit and then pull a rabbit out of your hat without further feedback" approach. It's good to hear it broken down in the article.

For my ex-boss, this "magician" image was what justified a consultant's high fees. Our actual assignment was a complete failure on multiple levels. Among those levels, what I think is the most awful part of the create-a-gold-plated-thingy-that-'just-works' paradigm is that it discards the human interaction part of development.

"Make it 'just work'" is a problematic meme now that it has come to permeate society (Apple Computer's huge prestige clearly being a driver of this). The problem I see is that algorithms/designs/platforms/technologies that "just work" make the trade-offs involved invisible to the end user but the end user is still effected by them and sooner or later they need to actually think about the trade-offs. Certainly, making your program "just work" - ie, not require excess thought, training or manual configuration on the part of the client, can be a good thing. The problem is when this approach dominates the entirety of design and development.