> You could have one pamphlet with the policy, and a separate book with the reasoning, and instruct people to check the book when proposing a change or exceptio

> You could have one pamphlet with the policy, and a separate book with the reasoning, and instruct people to check the book when proposing a change or exception. That's still a significant trade-off: putting together a book with the reasoning would be a lot more expensive than just creating the pamphlet. Your organization might not be able to afford the cost, period, or your boss may not agree to spend all that money just to make a minority of engineers happy in a few narrow cases. Then there's the question of how many people would actually consult the book of rationales; maybe it'd only be a handful. I'm guessing most organizations tend to pursue a "minimum viable policy" tradeoff: spend as little effort as possible to create a policy that addresses a particular set of high-priority problems (since that is easily justifiable), and ignore more theoretical concerns like worker education and the personality preferences of certain kinds of individuals.