[ChrisFoster]

Yes, the joy of a great design is in the delicate balance it strikes between simplicity and conflicting needs. There's plenty of anguish in finding the balance even in the head of a single person.

The space of solutions to a design problem is really high dimensional and the quality of the design has many local maxima. So from that point of view it's not too surprising that averaging the features of several designs puts you at a point in the space which is not a local maximum. For a more apples to apples comparison with the averaging of predictions, it might be useful to consider predicting the value of a random variable drawn from a multimodal distribution. In this case it's highly likely that different people will focus their predictions on different modes and averaging several predictions will be worse than taking a single one in isolation.