“making design mocks that will never see the light of day”

This seems accurate. I worked with UX teams on Cloud a lot. They _are_ brilliant. But every time the lifecycle seems to be:

1) They come out with fantastic mocks. 2) They run this by some internal committee and the design gets degraded. 3) Repeat step 2 10-20 times. 4) The final result is tiny incremental changes that look like the original UI was slightly re-shaped. 5) Rinse, repeat.