This certainly isn't the first time a project's requirements evolved as the days went by. 🙂
Nearly a couple of decades ago, I once watched in dismay as an engineer friend was led down a progressively more unreasonable design path. He was initially told to design a clean chip-amp based audio power amplifier that would put out 10 watts, which he did. Management then changed the requirements to 20W; he found a bigger (and more expensive) chip in the same family that would do the job. Management then changed the requirement to 50 W; this was met with two chips in parallel (doubling the cost, PCB size, and parts count). Finally, management raised the ante again, this time to 100 W; the engineer came up with a complex, bulky, ugly circuit board holding *four* of those expensive chip amps, working in bridged parallel mode.
What had started out as a perfectly reasonable design choice had now devolved into an expensive, ungainly, bulky, inelegant mess. 😱
There is a now-famous (but still funny) cartoon about this all too common process: Project Cartoon: How Projects Really Work (version 1.5)
-Gnobuddy
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