Others have mentioned management, but I'll just try to explain just how bad it can really go. First of all, keep in mind that these decision makers are, most of the time, are not engineers. Managers who are former (competent) engineers are few. This means that the one making the decisions don't really know what's best for the product.
Oftentimes the decision makers don't consult their engineers for their decision making, and base their ideas on "studies" and "data". Of course, studies are long and specific, and data is not the end of things. Context is very important, but that importance is often lost on people. For example, the decision for that whole console thing was probably decided purely from articles and data saying that all the successful games these days were designed for all platforms yada yada boom boom. They didn't fully consider the implications of that decision, resulting in blockers down the road, such as having to simplify the game's system to fit within the control scheme of a console.
Such decision making often pisses off devs who actually care about the game. People will have to work on lame stuff, get bored/irritated, quit, and be replaced with new people. New people will see the boring design, don't get excited, and only do the bare minimum. If they do see the potential, they can't bring that idea upward because they're still new. They don't have that power yet.
I'm not saying you must hate those decision makers. They work like that because they need to. It's easier to convince your boss to approve your design decisions when they're backed with studies and data. Big resource = big money = big risk. Still, people are often lazy with this kind of job. They don't consult their devs or properly study their sources. That's why things go wrong. Decision makers don't need to be super smart programmer/manager/designer/researcher hybrid. In a big company you'd have specialized people for those roles. You just need to call them and have a proper discussion.
Now, you can tell that random people with a computer don't have the same restriction as these. They're not bound by big money or a boss. They can decide what they think is fun and just create them.