>I believe software can be planned to near-perfection by one or more architects. If you establish a design, the implementation can be verified, at least to the level of detail defined in the plans.

^^^

I'm sorry to say that this presumption right here is responsible for an awful lot of the terrible code I've seen.

Doing architecture isn't like solving an equation.

Architectural decisions are nearly always trade offs and the worst trade offs are made by people who believe that there is a Perfect Answer to problems that have no one one right answer. They have a tendency to get religious about approaches, technologies, languages, etc. (sometimes even text editors and where to put the braces).