[mattmanser]

If you're constantly having this problem, it sounds like you're the problem.

You're gate keeping the end-users so the engineers can't become domain experts, albeit maybe inadvertently.

Good engineers will become domain experts naturally from talking to clients, usually experts far beyond the actual business users. That is, unless someone's interposing themselves between the engineers and the users.

It sounds like you are the person interposing, and you are the reason the engineers are not becoming domain experts.

That or you've always worked with bad engineers.

[softprod]

I haven't really thought of that as a possibility and I'll accept it may be true. I definitely wouldn't do that on purpose so I will have to take a closer look at how I treat situations like this.