I suspect that's more a result of a response to the low-productivity spiral that burnout seems to be.

I'm a little lost as to which part of my comment this was in response to. At Apple in the early 90's, you could rarely find an engineer at his desk. Working interactively with people was a bit of a mess, what with all the ping pong, foosball, video game playing, the midday trips to the gym, the beer parties, and some peoples' weekly offsites to see a movie. The only people getting any sort of burnout or burns just weren't changing out their bong water often enough.