There’s nothing more fun than a carefully thought out cohesive design that takes into account all business and technical constraints being randomly “improved” by a too-busy senior manager who’s been “off the tools” for decades.
“You should switch to NoSQL.” — a nearly verbatim quote from a meeting just last week. No justification or elaboration, just… abandon a relational database platform with two decades of built up business value on a whim.
“Rejoice! For you have been managed!”
In the end, we’d build in ‘breakpoints’ - things that we knew they’d pick up on and want to change so they felt like they’d had some input without damaging anything important. This worked very well.