I'm a little disconcerted that in each case it was other people that had to convince the author of the alternative approaches given that the he has been "doing software architectural work for a long time now".

Kudos for acknowledging the benefits of their approaches, but I feel like it's the architect's responsibility to reconize the most cost effective solution for the context at hand. How many problems aren't we hearing about that could have been solved with a new network switch instead received an application rewrite with an SOA architecture?