Part of the problem: you get given a complete document to review after it's been fully baked.

I'm pushing the need for basic engineering principles across whole organisations.

You wouldn't give an engineer 1000 lines of code to review without the original spec of what you're trying to achieve for context (at a minimum, ideally the reviewer was in the room when the work was introduced, and has full context).

So, these docs, they're given as an all or nothing.

Do you push back on the 39th metric that is defined to the utmost detail? Or just resign yourself to the fact that it is what it is?

A one (6 is the goto if we're talking Amazon?!) pager.. "this is what I am proposing" at least gives the skeleton of the idea to push back at the general shape of the idea, refine it, before all the emotional investment of your precious report being complete.

Y'know.. the traditional product running through the spec in a SCRUM* environment.. the engineers doing proper code reviews..

* Yes SCRUM is dead, but that's another thing.

> Part of the problem: you get given a complete document to review after it's been fully baked.

Not fully baked, worse: made to sound confidently correct, orthogonal to its actual correctness.

I've had this situation and basically just had to throw out stuff that was written because its completely terrible/wrong. Either start again or just give up.