In my experience, this usually leads to having a team of "architects" whose job it is to sit in meetings with people actually building things and tell them how

In my experience, this usually leads to having a team of "architects" whose job it is to sit in meetings with people actually building things and tell them how to do it. I've yet to meet anyone who can do that job well. No one is good enough to reliably prescribe solutions from afar without getting their hands dirty. There will be weirdness and corner cases and overlooked details that have to be accounted for. Going back to the architect who has been doing other things for the last six months isn't likely to yield much insight in what to do about that. I think that in pretty much all cases, you'd be better off just taking that architect and telling him to write the code. If you don't think you have enough good people to do the amount of work you need to do with that approach, you're trying to do too much work.