Exactly because of much greater stakes. A lot of heavyweights involved, and nobody agrees to yield. The result is a compromise, aka a solution which is unsatisfactory to all parties to an equal degree, as they say.
Best designs are produced by small, tightly-knot, often one-person design teams. Examples: Unix, Clojure, SQLite, Boeing-747, Westminster Palace in London.
Sometimes a small team with a cohesive vision keeps on attracting like-minded people or matching ideas, and the project grows with contributions from a large number of people. The key part of every such success is the vetting process. Examples: Python, Ruby, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Worst designs with most glaring, painful, expensive, even tragic shortcomings are produced by large committees of very important people from huge, very (self-)important companies, agencies, departments, etc. Each of them has an axe to grind or, worse, a pet peeve. Examples: PL/I, Algol-68, the Space Shuttle (killed two crews because the escape system was removed from the quite sane initial design); to a lesser degree, it's also HTML, CSS, and, well, C++ to a large degree :( The disease has a name [1].
Sometimes a relatively small and cohesive team in a large honking corporation produces a nice, cohesive design, like this happened to Typescript, certain better parts of CSS, and some of the better parts of C++. This may sometimes make a false impression that "design by committee" sometimes works.
The original Unix is also about 5 people, with Ken Thompson being largely credited with the general design.
Of course, later the decoherence increased; I'd say that the adoption of Berkeley Sockets is one of the inflection points where severely different architectural principles came into play.
Apparently Joan Mitchell and Bill Pennebaker were the key driving force behind the JPEG format [1], Ms Mitchell having already invented the widely deployed fax compression algorithm, and a few related things.
Best designs are produced by small, tightly-knot, often one-person design teams. Examples: Unix, Clojure, SQLite, Boeing-747, Westminster Palace in London.
Sometimes a small team with a cohesive vision keeps on attracting like-minded people or matching ideas, and the project grows with contributions from a large number of people. The key part of every such success is the vetting process. Examples: Python, Ruby, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Worst designs with most glaring, painful, expensive, even tragic shortcomings are produced by large committees of very important people from huge, very (self-)important companies, agencies, departments, etc. Each of them has an axe to grind or, worse, a pet peeve. Examples: PL/I, Algol-68, the Space Shuttle (killed two crews because the escape system was removed from the quite sane initial design); to a lesser degree, it's also HTML, CSS, and, well, C++ to a large degree :( The disease has a name [1].
Sometimes a relatively small and cohesive team in a large honking corporation produces a nice, cohesive design, like this happened to Typescript, certain better parts of CSS, and some of the better parts of C++. This may sometimes make a false impression that "design by committee" sometimes works.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee