Hickory: But you do have to complete the four 'Brothers In Arms' quests, whether you recruit them via their side quests, or not.
Is this something that was added in a patch? I'm 100% sure I ignored all of the Brothers in Arms quests on my second playthrough when I was checking to see what happens. No Zoltan, no Roche, no Keira, no anyone, and the game let me do so without any problems.
I cheated in that second playthrough for the sake of speeding up my "what if" playing around with what can and can't be done (I bumped up my level and money to ungodly levels, as you can no doubt see from the attached screenshot), but I don't think I was using the console at that point so that shouldn't be a factor. The attached screenshot is from the free-play mode after the completion of the story.