[svdad]

> However, a defining quality of successful projects I've been involved in is that there is one person driving the overall design and that person runs things closer to a dictatorship than a democracy.

Yeah, that's been my experience too, but I keep running into people who think everything runs better if the whole team decides and everyone gets a say. OK, there's definitely merit in getting input from what one hopes is a bunch of smart people, and it also helps morale for everyone to feel like they're being heard, but at the end of the day I think there really needs to be one or at most a few people who make the final decisions.