Many lifetimes ago I worked on a project where all customer desired changes were 'scoped' by engineering. A little report was written about how the change could be implemented, to include any possible complications and a LOC estimate. My manager, did not want us to do a customer desired change. So he wrote the 'impact report'. The problem basically required taking functionality that applied to 1 thing, and made it apply to an (existing) array of things. His solution was as if arrays did not exist, and the resulting LOC was N times bigger than it actually was going to be. Of course, this change was not authorized until the manager left, and someone that knew it was BS spoke up. Same thing here.