Fair point.

I was mostly just making the counter point, however to expand on this, at least with the email thread you can take longer to compose your response or go talk to someone about it if you think it's important. It's viewed a bit weirder to follow up a face-to-face meeting with your counter points in an email.

But I actually just think communication is hard for a lot of people. Locking people in a room and expecting them to come up with a decision is a pretty poor way to work. Combining both text and talking, and giving enough time between discussion and decisions is probably a winner.

Communication is a fundamentally hard problem. How to tell if a given semantic state has been replicated in the brain of the others. Really until people repeat back in their own words you have no idea; even then, they may have alarming different versions of some of the concepts used in the semantic state.

Equal playing field.

You’re missing it. Check your textually-adept privilege.

Seriously. I’ve always been a very good writer but people in STEM often aren’t.

And then when it's face to face, you have people who aren't lingually adept, what then? Take someone who speaks English as a second language. They may not be able to process what's being said in a face to face as fast as the topic is moving, but in an email thread they can take their time to read it all, and compose a response (which may take longer for them due to English being a second language). It's not as simple as either of you make it seem.