>This is a common criticism of Valve's model, and it's fair to say that Valve's model isn't clearly obviously better, but those attack's on Valve don't make the case that the traditional hierarchical model, with its own well-known problems, is better.

I would say that the key difference is that in the traditional model I can learn about my potential bosses during the interview process. In the valve model I don't even know who my bosses will be during the interview process. As people like to say, interviews are a two way process.