There is no "right" thing. There may be an optimal thing from the development perspective and an optimal thing from the business perspective. Since the two pieces cannot exist without each other, both parties have to communicate effectively and trust each other to find the optimal decision for the combined problem space which may be sub-optimal when considered separately.

> If boss can't trust the minions to do the right thing, someone's got the wrong job.

There are many people who have wrong jobs.

More importantly, there are many people who are good, but not perfect. They do some aspects of their work greatly, other aspect less well. Good boss has some idea about that and is able to work with people who are not super great.

Least not last, even very good people often disagree about many things, including whether refactoring is needed or not or what kind of refactoring to do. Even if boss trusted all and listened all, he would still be told plenty of contradictory opinions.