Sounds like your team kind of backed into an insight psychological research has identified and Google has attempted to apply. Something called "psychological safety".
"Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?" - from re:work
There's a great NYTimes article about it that looks at your hunch about the weirdness of the team members being the key to awesomeness. But Google ultimately realized that it wasn't so much about how different the backgrounds of the team members were, but was instead that that internal diversity could produce psychological safety.
An anecdotal effect of said environment. We stopped doing person based scrum. We were able to get away from the "justify my personal usefulness on the team" status updates. And it was awesome.
"Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?" - from re:work
There's a great NYTimes article about it that looks at your hunch about the weirdness of the team members being the key to awesomeness. But Google ultimately realized that it wasn't so much about how different the backgrounds of the team members were, but was instead that that internal diversity could produce psychological safety.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn...