As a side note. Yes. My standards are very high. Take a look at the survival Fenris vs the creative one. I can say, as a fact, that survival mode can not make anything amazing in comparison to creative.
...
And this is where I have to object.
The fenris isnt the best example I have, although the "floor plans" were nothing close to what the current fenris has. They would have been 2x3 plain stone hallways. The floors would have been exactly 3 tall everywhere, with no room for any material but the stone its made of. It would, to put it kindly, suck.
Now we have nice hallways large enough to do things.

We have room for redstone, or other "behind the scenes" stuff.

We were able to carve out the pit in under 6 months, and can work without danger of falling to our deaths.

We can use materials we literaly could not have gotten otherwise (such as bedrock) for detailing.

We arent restricted to the 3-high floorplan concept that limited the first fenris.

Please. If you think you can even do "as well" in survival mode, show it. Because this isn't the best I have.
Now on the topic of survival bringing more people together... If you can't work well with someone on a large project, it doesn't matter what game mode you're in, you aren't going to want to work with them. It's that simple. I can work with Sandwich well, and can/would trust him to work on a project of mine, such as the deimos, without screwing anything up. There are few others I can say the same about. Survival mode isn't going to change that. In the case of the fenris,
most of the team was donators. Very few people actually
built anything. So in essence... It's always been the baby of those few people.
Not to say that survival isn't fun. I play on 3 servers right now, Qaz's, for the fenris (creative), a survival PvP Factions server, and another creative server that I'm making the deimos and stuff on due to additional tools I have there. On that server, even just creative mode wouldn't cut it for the project. I'm one of the top players on the survival server, have a nice base that I can get stuff done in. That is where the challenge belongs, not on a server of creation (hint, this is qaz's).