I'm sure by me saying "dumbing it down," will alienate some folks but I think I got my point across. I've worked with designers and developers who swear by their code. If you try to explain to them that a button was hard to find, they'll tell you it was designed that way for a reason. I used to work for an e-commerce company and every design decision we made for the site was based on one of two ppl's opinion. We would often use A/B testing, but I would say 80% of the things we put into production was because the VP of Marketing wanted things his way.