Cap Watkins, a design and product leader, writes about design culture, team management, and how engineers and designers work together.
HN commenters link to his essay 'The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck' to explain how much a team should care about details.
I guess it really comes down to the trade-off between customization and familiarity. IME in any given company there's plenty of people going to bat for the former, and hardly anyone that cares about the latter.
On the "sliding scale of giving a fuck" [0], there's usually plenty of graphics designers and managers whose job revolves around giving an '8' for customisation and branding, and most devs seem to consider usability at about a '5' relative to their other work, so they don't offer up a lot of resistance.
[0] http://blog.capwatkins.com/the-sliding-scale-of-giving-a-fuck
My guess is that he means something more like what's discussed in this essay, "The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck": http://blog.capwatkins.com/the-sliding-scale-of-giving-a-fuck