Yeah - that sounds ideal honestly. And I think their success bears it out. A company driven by the passions and creativity of some of the most talented programmers and artists in the industry. They gate for self motivated people through their hiring process, and it works well for them. The idea that organisational structures should be authoritarian in order to be productive is fundamentally flawed IMHO, and Valve (as well as companies like SEMCO, and educational organisations like Sudbury Valley) ably bear that out.

All large organizations are fundamentally pathological, and even smaller ones will have their own querks and disfunctions.

Valve has gotten a lot of attention, and a lot of flak, over its flat structure and "drivers", but I'm not sure that's particularly worse than some of the atrociously broken engineering practices I've seen at F500 companies.