As described, I can't say who's at fault. What is outrageous about having few complaints about a high level design, but many more concrete complaints when there is a concrete implementation?
If someone can derail the project they should have been giving feed back iteratively, otherwise we fall into a water fall trap.
I don't really like the "senior design review" because of this lack of continued involvement.
Sometimes its bike shedding, sure. Sometimes the actual implementation has flaws that weren't revealed in the early design. There's a reason we don't use waterfall and calling it an "early design review" doesn't make that better.
If someone can derail the project they should have been giving feed back iteratively, otherwise we fall into a water fall trap.
I don't really like the "senior design review" because of this lack of continued involvement.