[NortySpock]

It depends on the audience and context. If it's a stakeholder or key person, or you're in mixed company with people on various levels on the totem pole, then you need a few phrases grease the skids, placate feelings, and get the meeting participants' attention back to focusing on the most important issues.

You often still need people to feel like their ideas are being considered so they don't just shut down and contribute nothing in future meetings, or consider you to be railroading every meeting.

Granted, after the meeting, I'll often joking-but-only-serious point out "Look, our backlog is really long -- let's be honest, we're not going to revisit <that> for months at this rate, so I hope you realize it's not a priority and probably won't be unless the priority changes. If we need it on a shorter timeline, talk to <personName>."

I have very occasionally used hard-shutdowns of ideas or requests, but I think I have only used it when an idea was threatening to balloon the scope far beyond any hope of success. Maybe twice in the last few years.

("No, I'm not going to implement it that way -- it's needlessly complicated" or "I will not discuss timelines for phase 2 of this project until phase 1 is complete -- let's get back to closing out the outstanding issues with phase 1.")

There's a time to be frank, and other times you need to smile and gently redirect just to get things moving again before you waste an hour sparring or circling an endless unresolved debate.