In my experience, "high-friction environments where people are encouraged to compete and fight to support their ideas, where they feel valued for fighting for themselves, rather than patronized..." are dominated by people who enjoy competing and fighting for their own sake. The value of any ideas presented frequently takes a backseat to who can win the political fight. (This is actually one of the most common, and most frustrating, failure modes of academia and one of the major reasons I'm no longer interested in being in that environment.) Or, the value of the ideas takes a backseat to who benefits most from the one chosen. Or, any of a dozen other reasons irrelevant to the ideas.

You may regard an alternative as "idealistic", and it may be, but the alternative is how many existing environments are supposed to work, if you press those involved hard enough, and is frequently pretty bad at sorting ideas.