This is perfectly understandable, however this particular discussion is one where the difference between correlation and causation is appropriate. We are talking specifically about paying programmers by their "productivity." If you want to say that "productivity" is defined as the correlation between a person and project success regardless of whether there is a causal relationship or not, and regardless of whether they engage in programming activities, project management activities, picking good project activities, discussion activities, or even just making everyone else espresso so they can produce working code, that's fine.

But what we're saying in that case is that we can't measure the productivity of a programmer, we can't establish a relationship between programming activities on the scale of a single person. I agree that the correlations you can observe are perfectly useful for management and that one can deliver great (or working, or valuable) software without an objective metric of programmer productivity. I agree that this elusive metric may not be necessary. It may not even be useful, as I tried to demonstrate elsewhere when I discussed Ned, Fred, Ed, and Jed.

But that really underscores my point: We can't tie compensation to programmer productivity because we can't measure it. Your point seems to be that we don't have to tie compensation to programmer productivity, that we can tie it to correlation with project success, for example.

Fine with me, I'd say we're in violent agreement and that our stances are compatible.