Comment by plinkplonk

"I agree that there is a serious criticism here, and that sufficiently deep thinking is underrated."

Exactly. The criticism of TDD is (or should be, imo) about the "Driven" part, not so much the "Tests" part. Using conformance to an increasing number of tests as a hill climbing metric and a substitute for deep thinking(sometimes expressed as the "TDD is not about testing, it is about design") gets you stuck on local minima, a point Peter Seibel delineates clearly in his blog post on the subject .

I do disagree with you somewhat in that I think Ron Jeffries ( and most of the Agile evangelist/conference speaker/methodology-book-author types for that matter) are dishonest gurus who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, but reasonable people can disagree here.