I think you hit the nail on the head. Remote work is about the chemistry of the team. If you don't have at least 1 person that is your coding buddy, then you're generally not going to be great at working remotely (this concept doesn't seem to be unique to remote...). Any difficulties I've previously had with remote work boils down to some lack of teamwork among coworkers that makes it completely unproductive. Personally, I long to be a part of an exceptional distributed team.