Given a large enough sandbox this could be a great working environment. I once worked in an R&D department to produce physically shipped (diskette/cd-rom) software. It was the best of times. Go to conferences, learn shiny tech, make up new toys, sell them as products. We even had annual toy budgets for anything no-questions-asked as well as constant upgrades to the latest hardware running obscure operating systems. Unfortunately the company run too well, eventually shrinking to collecting license and maintenance support fees.

One funny story was how whenever we'd be burning the midnight oil to produce the final release, we'd declare it the golden master and hand it over to our shipping department to distribute to our customers. One time I had to make a recall due to a fatal bug. The masters were handed back to me with a smile and when I asked, she said that after the last few recalls of golden masters, she always let them sit on a shelf for a week before actually shipping anything.