If you go back into histroy and re-read the literature regarding Coupling and Cohesion (or even normalisation and denormalisation) you are half way there. Look cross cutting concerns as well as covered AOP. All of this has been known and covered for decades.

"Tim M wrote: (on top of which I'm a novice programmer, as these things go: only three years of actual experience and that with a giant pile of legacy code)." 3 years shoud make you more than novice. And working with legacy code is an essential skill to any programmer - debugging other people's code - good and bad - teaches you many lessons. Generally: There are some great commercial and open source tools now to support remote and distributed working. I have used webex and similar for oline collaborative working; IM; Skype; Google docs for document sharing and various others. Thoughtworks have some great tools and they are now looking to integrate those with Google Wave, which should be interesting. Distributed VCS is now available, automated test management tools from unit to system (Junit, Selenim et al), online PM tools for agile project management and the plethora of wikis, blogs, facebook type apps and so on.