I agree with everything you said. To summarize: the single most important thing that works is transparency. When the lead makes his decision making/planning and

I agree with everything you said. To summarize: the single most important thing that works is transparency. When the lead makes his decision making/planning and generic thought process transparent then he doesn't end up in an embarrassing situation when he has to argue about even the smallest technical detail. If the solutions the team lead is proposing isn't different in effect from what the dev is proposing, then why is he arguing in the first place?