[cleong]

Although pracitcally what you said is true, many teams I've worked in had seniors that would design projects based on their interests. I'd like to say there is a way to design objectively based on trade-offs for the project. If you ever worked in enterprise-like "frameworks" like Magento you will see the design patterns and how they achieve certain goals in a project. E.G EAV, XML module & layout declaration for flexibility, MVVM for single responsibility controllers meant for large enterprise teams working on the same controller at one time.

[mikekchar]

Yeah. I think that kind of thing can work in certain circumstances. Definitely I've seen the dictatorial design approach be quite successful -- at least short term. It's pretty awful for the participants, though. Normally your best talent leaves. I'm less convinced about the framework approach. I've never actually seen it work well. Normally the design is just not flexible enough and something breaks pretty badly. Of course, there is a limit to the number of projects you can see in your lifetime, so I could well be missing something :-)