I don't buy into this. I've been producing music for over 10 years now. The "snippet" and fire and forget approach doesn't work. I'm sitting on thousands of different loops, demos, half-finished songs, and so on.
Over the course of of a session, when you're jamming with your synthesizers and instruments, a project can transform from A to B to C to D to E where E ends up sounding nothing like A. You have your hard- and software synths, fantastic effect plugins and hardware, drum machines, more outboard gear. You tweak and compress, change melodies and harmonies. You press 'save as a new version' every minute.
Your wandering mind be damned, if you want a great track you need to stop, sit down, and focus. All good tracks I come up with come from a focus on quality, not quantity. By the way, in my opinion, iterative refinements do not belong into the category of "quantity", I don't know how anyone could make such a statement.
Of course you sometimes need the sessions to come up with some idea that resonates with you, but after that you (read: I, I'm talking about my own experience) have to force yourself to focus.
My own work-flow is kind of a mixture of the two. I find that I have to play around with my synths a bit just to find that right sound - it might not be the right sound for the current project, but I save it just in case. Same thing with melodies, I have a ton of files with unfinished melodies that I mine ideas from.
My best work is actually a culmination of these "snippets" that I build up over a few months/weeks. It's like with each mediocre/average project I produce, I'm discovering the parts of the great one not too far off.
It's the same thing with code, design and all my other creative projects. I have to wade through a lot of weaker ideas and designs in order to discover the best parts. And once I figure those out, it's mostly a rewrite of all my past ideas into the one good idea.
Over the course of of a session, when you're jamming with your synthesizers and instruments, a project can transform from A to B to C to D to E where E ends up sounding nothing like A. You have your hard- and software synths, fantastic effect plugins and hardware, drum machines, more outboard gear. You tweak and compress, change melodies and harmonies. You press 'save as a new version' every minute.
Your wandering mind be damned, if you want a great track you need to stop, sit down, and focus. All good tracks I come up with come from a focus on quality, not quantity. By the way, in my opinion, iterative refinements do not belong into the category of "quantity", I don't know how anyone could make such a statement.
Of course you sometimes need the sessions to come up with some idea that resonates with you, but after that you (read: I, I'm talking about my own experience) have to force yourself to focus.