Design by internal committees is largely a bad move since your users will always want decisions reversed, or call any new features 'feature creep' or over-engineering. There is a trend of design where secrecy is allowed because devs code for 'the developer experience' and not the 'user experience'. Striking a balance between those two is worth it IMHO. (If that means feedback from your users then so be it, but don't let the users dictate the whole of the system).