I am really not saying they should, but it would help if they did because the project fails after a year due to the overwhelming burden of the disorganized lega

I am really not saying they should, but it would help if they did because the project fails after a year due to the overwhelming burden of the disorganized legacy. Note that it's not just me on the project; it's also a lot of other non-senior team members that aren't really capable of handling the legacy without introducing serious bugs. You're thinking in an over-constrained framework where there are just two choices -- either to form a consensus or to reject the ideas. If instead you take a higher view, you will see that giving senior engineers ownership and freedom allows the management to see if the engineers sink or swim. The technical lessons will then be more apparent.