If by old man in the hills you're talking about a guy growing outdoors in a remote location or something... then I'd have to say the reason for success with no nutes is the natural soil there. If you're planting straight into the ground there are no limits for the roots to grow and continue to move into fresher soil with unused nutrients, not to mention water washing good stuff from other soil into the soil used by the plant. I'd be really surprised to see an indoor container grow without any added nutes and is still successful. If you transplant regularly enough perhaps you could do it, but I would think that would include at least one transplant during flowering, which I just don't do. Not sure if it would be a real bad thing to transplant during flowering stages but any minor stress that I can eliminate during that time is a good idea to me. Also reduces stress on me to not have to transplant a big budded female a few weeks into flowering.

But like I said earlier, I do believe an excellent soil mix would provide enough nutrients for the plant to survive the flowering stage and you would get some bud out of it, I just think that the increase in quality/quantity from nutrients farrr farrrrrr out-weighs any negative aspects of nutes, such as cost, figuring out the right mixture, or just more work to add nutrients than it is to just water the plants. So I just don't understand why anyone would want to grow without nutrients. Also if its really about the money then it'll be difficult to aquire that great of a soil mixture anyways, however there are several "home remedy" type solutions to add nutrients to your soil. Banana peels, used coffee grounds...... piss if you really wanna go that way for nitrogen (not recommended for consumable plants lol).

Anyways thats just my thoughts, if anyone has or knows of a grow log where someone grows successfully with just water I'd love to see it. I think that'd be a pretty interesting grow experiment, so if there are no current logs, then I would ask that if you are going to grow without nutrients... log it here so we can all see how it works out. What if we were all spending all this money on nutrients for no reason?.. haha doubt it.