Communication/Collaboration & ability to write elegant code are pretty symbiotic but I'd generally say it's harder to find someone who can elegantly design/code a system than it is to find people to talk about it(Reqs, specs etc).
Smaller teams means more of the communication takes place in the 10x programmer's head rather than in multiple meetings between 1x programmers. A team of 3 10X programmers should be more efficient than 30 1x programmers simply because communication will be more efficient.
Hah, my own anecdotal evidence has been in favor of smaller teams for the communications reason you cite. Probably a bit of a bad analogy but it made me think of 3 Unix processes vs 30. Way harder to manage IPC between 30 processes as opposed to 3.
(Still, working is more important than talking about it.)