Seems that there was no manager and constant "architectural" discussions because everyone wanted only to show off how smart they are. There are companies where

Seems that there was no manager and constant "architectural" discussions because everyone wanted only to show off how smart they are. There are companies where no one from business side knows what is going on in development and they are not interested. They just pour money into dev and what they know it is only that "development is expensive and takes a lot of time". I bet the goal was something like "just ship the system" which probably never happened or took a lot of time. Maybe even devs making their own requirements according to what they think is needed. So I think you are too charitable with such interpretation that there were some goals or managers at all.