In what situation is it actually a good idea to employ a large number of bad programmers, rather than a small number of good ones? We shouldn't be making trade-offs for the sake of bad ideas ;)
There's a distinction to be made between preventing risky behaviour and relying only on a programmer's good judgement to avoid mistakes. Even if your team is solely good programmers there's a lot to be said for discouraging unsafe behaviour by default since anyone can have a bad day, distraction, etc.
I view this situation as somewhat analogous to having guards on power tools: even a highly skilled operator doesn't want to rely on always doing something perfectly.
The nice thing about code is that (when version controlled) all mistakes can be fixed retroactively. As long as two programmers aren't having a bad day at once, pairing will catch "all" errors. As long as all your programmers aren't having a bad day at once, code review will catch "all" errors again. ;)
...in either scenario. During code review, however, I'd expect that the good programmers would reach much more strongly to the rogue commits than the mediocre programmers would.
