I've learned today about the concept of Atwood's duck (though I had heard of it before without the name): Add a design element that is intentionally bad, just so stakeholders can "contribute" without forcing you do redo a design just for the sake of having contributed. The naming example being a duck added to the animation of the queen in a chess game.
This made me wonder, how often these things end up as features. What if the stakeholders had liked the duck, misunderstanding it as some clever joke or some such, and had insisted, rather than on removing the duck, to instead give the duck a crown -- or worse, as leash held by the queen, compromising the animation the duck was intended to keep safe from pointless interference.
Any anecdotes out there? :)