> I have also witnessed discussions where management admits that they want something done in an SPA so that they can show that work to their investors, as a means of getting funding to do other projects.

Absolutely. This extends well beyond SPAs, too, in my experience. I recently burned part of a month explaining to my senior management chain why you don't just, literally, "do machine learning." Of course, it turns out that the ask was coming from the C-suite, who wanted to put it on a slide somewhere because "everyone is doing machine learning, we need to do machine learning."