I have seen this kind of problem (a lack of communication resulting in requirements that drive bad design) many times. The most memorable example was a require

I have seen this kind of problem (a lack of communication resulting in requirements that drive bad design) many times. The most memorable example was a requirement that "Device must run 150 hours on a 9V battery". This was a difficult constraint, and the final design was a complicated thing with multiple power supplies and an intricate method of starting up from sleep mode which involved feeding the power backwards through a power amplifier (i.e. power to V_common initially went from the battery to the amplifier and out through the power supply leg of the amplifier, then reversed once the 5V power supply woke up). Literally the craziest design I've ever seen. Because of all the complexity, debugging took forever and after the schedule slipped for a year I got pulled in. When I asked the engineer why they went through such efforts to save power, they said that it was necessary to meet the requirements. I then asked what was driving the power constraint, why was it so important? He literally said "I'm an engineer. Those are the requirements. It's my job to make a design that meets the requirements. That's all." So, I investigated the requirement. It turned out that 150 hours was more of a "nice to have", and the real requirement was a need to do a 48 hour measurement, then an additional 48 hour measurement if someone forgot to change the battery. I challenged the requirement and we were able to release with a relaxed constraint of 100 hours. Unfortunately, all that complexity remained baked in, and the design remains clunky to this day. On the next design, I just switched from a 9V battery to C cells, and eliminated all the crazy power management for a simple supply. It turned out that customers cared more about cost of batteries than weight. The real problem was the 9V batteries. And 9V batteries were originally chosen because it was thought this made the power supply simpler!