I think you may be jumping to (admittedly non declamatory) conclusions. At least, you are jumping to very different ones than I did. When I read about their model (I just recently took an online class given by Robin) I concluded that the amount of time spent in meetings is something that would be very difficult to predict, one way or another. To assume that democratic planning is equivalent to 1) face-to-face meetings and 2) a lot of time spent in meetings is, I think, simply unjustified by the evidence. I also don't think there is anything incompatible between delegation and division of labor and democratic planning --- in fact I can't imagine democratic planning (or planning of any sort) without it.
I'm curious to know why it seems that when people hear the phrase "democratic planning" they (apparently) assume that every decision, no matter how minute, must be made by everyone together. Justin seemed to leap to this conclusion as well, so perhaps there is something that I am just overlooking.
I'm also curious to know how, if we value self-management over alienation, we can do without democratic planning.
I think their work deserves some serious attention (no matter how rude Albert has been to Lou Proyect). One of the great problems with the Left is that it does not (to my eyes) have a coherent idea of how to eliminate, inter alia, alienation and provide for people's material needs. Simply grabbing the Market off the shelf of prepackaged ideas I think is a bit dangerous, and so we should at least try to engage these sorts of ideas...
Bill