Yes and no. He may be free from formal interference, but the higher up you go into management, the more time you've got to spend managing instead of creating.
It's great for someone with the interests and skill-set of Sawyer. If you're a balance/systems-fag, then it doesn't really matter whether you're writing/designing an area v whether someone else is, because you can implement a set of rules and system mandates, and have minions do all the basic design. Rising higher means expanding the reach of your vision and style.
If you're a creative/story/design-fag, then greater reliance on minions will dilute your work. That's not to say that you're best being at the absolute coal-face, writing text for minor NPCs and choosing what colour clothing the random mooks wear. But once you're at a project management role, you're probably having very little direct writing/art/area-design entering the game. Perhaps you'll get to do a few areas yourself, but that isn't 'project management', that's you doubling up as both the project manager and doing a design role on top of it.
My main concern, though, is that MCA has repeatedly shown that he's poorly suited to the thing that he often likes to do - jumping in to write 1-2 NPCs and a single small quest hub. They are always interesting, really well written....and feel like they're transplanted in from a completely different game. New Reno is more glaring than most, but it's strongly typical of his output in that scenario - some really awesome quest design, interesting larger-than-life characters, the most entertaining party member in the game...and it is all so woefully out of place in the setting that it actively detracts from the game.
Everyone has assumed that Sawyer is the bad guy in forcing MCA to cut the heart of his 2 NPCs in PoE. And MCA's ideas for those NPCs does sound really neat, and you can see how they might combine with what's already there (which is pretty good) to make a far more interesting pair of intertwined NPCs than anything else in the game. But fuck, look at his track record. I'm more than willing to believe that they simply didn't fit the setting, the mood and the game's broader writing style, and that Sawyer was just the first project manager to have the balls to call MCA out on this crap.
I really like MCA's work. Even Alpha Protocol was a really interesting failure, of a kind that could be used as a productive learning foundation for a genuinely great game. And it had some of the best writing and C+C the genre has seen. But it's not a style that can just slot into any project. MCA has never been good at writing 'realistic' characters...in fact, he's never even tried to write 'realistic' characters, from what I can see. 'Kill Bill' is his usual approach - he writes comic book characters, but in the very best sense of the word. Operating at his best, he writes comic book characters of the kind you'd find in one of the better Alan Moore works, grand and colourful stand-ins for philosophical themes, different aspects of humanity, and tragedy writ large and entertainingly colourful among the angst and despair. Rainbow-bright and gritty, instead of dark and gritty.
And that only works when he's the guy in charge of the writing and the setting.
Ideally, I'd like to see MCA working below Project Manager - fuck dealing with milestones, employee management, etc. But at a much higher level of responsibility than what he's been doing. Having the guy write an NPC or two as a stretch goal is actively harmful to a project. Better to have him as 'lead designer', or even 'lead writer', while giving the project management responsibilities to someone who can sperg about systems and can get the project running on time and under budget (and whatever Sawyer's flaws, he instantly improved Obsidian's performance in those aspects).
