I've never heard of (or thought of) your interpretation of the corollary to Brooke's Law, but removing people from projects until they succeed and are on time seems like a bold strategy.
Happens regularly in the Free Software & Open Source world, where software projects are often forked by a single individual. Obviously enterprise software is on another level, but the principle remains that reduction to a smaller development team (for some period of time) does not necessarily correlate to a threat to viability and has often indeed been a reinjection of vitality.
