Escaping the Self Denial Instinct

In Hearing without listening, 37Signals screws up, then admits what they did wrong and how they fixed it. In the end, it's just a matter of several weeks downtime before the application is working a whole lot better than before. This is exactly what adaptive design is all about, and it's also why software estimation is a myth. How would you cope with a similar situation if your project had a whole series of milestones, a formal requirements architecture, and a feature checklist that had been given the holy anointment of 'sign-off'? Don't talk to me about change requests. What about all those requirements documents and diagrams with the old features painstakingly documented and annotated? They are worthless now. Your project just blew half of it's budget out the asses of the architecture astronauts. So on Daffodil Day, spare a thought for the poor programmers all over the world who are being forced into cancerous projects like this, every single day, after day, after day, after day...