Both their one-sided blame story and yours are likely to be just as wrong. There's no question that many people in systems analyst or architecture roles, that

Both their one-sided blame story and yours are likely to be just as wrong. There's no question that many people in systems analyst or architecture roles, that are divorced from the details of actual development, came up with flawed designs that were more work to implement and produced worse results. That was one of the antipatterns that Agile was a reaction to. The problem with those roles is that they tended to be embedded in a waterfall architecture model, where system development involved some variety of requirements -> analysis, architecture & design -> development. The amount of interaction and iteration between those phases was often much lower than it should have been. There are many factors involved here. Simply having different teams for those functions is one of them, since that tends to reduce interaction between the phases.