I feel like someone who has published close to zero books and writes articles about how to publish books. It’s been years and years since I was involved with having a band together — as a kind of band leader.
Anyway, I prefer substitute jobs and ad hoc projects of many reasons. The biggest one is that having a band together is like a marriage, you better like each other and understand how things work. Otherwise there’s just a lot of drama rather than musicianship.
I do think think that in the current situation having loose bands work much better. You put together the music, have a pool of musicians that could be configured in various configs. It resembles how the jazz bands operate in NY or LA. If the musicians know each other, how they play, it’s just a matter of re-assembling bands for various purposes. You could even get more gigs as you have more ‘cards on the table.’
There are bands like U2 that just seem to work year after year, and they also had their internal drama. The worst that could happen is that the band members show up for the obligatory show or album recording. After that they again part their ways. So it’s really an artificial band situation, as well.
This of course works if there’s some kind of monetary outcome from the work. Or if you are/were someone like Frank Zappa, just playing in his bands lead to lifetime fame.