What is the advantage/disadvantage of joining a team vs individual? Does a team have more crunching power?

Your question is a bit like "what is the advantage/disadvantage of having friends".

Team members encourage eachother to crunch harder, exchange experiences and knowledge, help eachother with problems, fool around in fora, compete with other teams and sometimes meet eachother in real life.

Of course one can be a single cruncher, as well as some people can live without friends - but ...

Actually the question was pretty straight forward and had absolutly nothing to do with having friends or not. The question was about crunching power with regards to one way vs another. If there was some really informative info posted answering the question, then the question would not have been asked. And then we wouldn't have to read some smart butt post like yours.

The crunching power of a team is simply the sum of the total number of computers owned by team members.
This crunching power would also be available to the projects if those same members of the team remained teamless.

Teams are, in effect, just a social club. Members can get help with crunching problems from other team members, but that help is also available from the projects anyway.