Some people's assertions about how their idea has to be correct and is immune to criticism reminds me of a project I've been involved in for 4 years and counting: getting data at the level we want to do the analyses we want.
Sounds simple, right? Just pull all the data, there you go! And then you realize the source system doesn't do that cleanly. And, the way it provides data is a jumbled mess and you can't just accumulate it neatly, so you have to create rules to organize the data correctly so you can accumulate it. But, as you build rules to organize you realize "if I offset X, I should get Y" only works in some situations, in others you get Y' and you really do want Y. So now you have to have a rule for some situation that gets you Y, but suddenly R shows up elsewhere. Oh, and now there's a situation C* you have to deal with that screws up everything, so now you have to write more rules for that.
4 years. From identifying "what do we want" to "where should it go" to "how to we quality check this" both in a single field and across multiple fields, to "how do we accumulate this so it's correct at a given point in time" to "how do we make this so that we can join other data easily and in the correct order," every step has been asking questions, making sure we get the right answers, running through scenarios, asking questions knowing what problems we'd like to solve and asking does this help us get there and do that?
The point I'm trying to make here for some of you: solutions are rarely as easy as they seem. Troubleshoot your ideas. Spend more than 3 seconds thinking about it. Try to pick holes in them, ask does this really make sense? If you find a hole, ask do I need to change my solution entirely, or can I come up with an easy solution to that - and then does that cause a problem I didn't anticipate. Listen to feedback, when someone tells you hey, there's a problem here don't just ignore it and say "bah, that will never happen, my solution is so easy it's practically foolproof!" If you're not doing any of that, you're wasting your time touting a non-solution that almost certainly doesn't fix the problem and creates more problems than it solves.
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