If you wanted a pithy explanation this comment points to it. It's the speed of the justice system (of which city council is ultimately a part). People want to complain about the participants, but the system itself is so goddamn slow, and more and more decisions are plugged into it, that it's slowness is really the central cause. A working system should be able to handle baseless allegations and NIMBY whining; you can't expect people to show self-restraint.

(The justice system's slowness is also at the heart of another critical problem, the failure of the criminal justice system. Again, people want to complain about the agents, but it's the system itself, particularly it's glacial slowness, that creates perverse incentives and terrible outcomes.)

The justice system is, at its heart, a collaborative information system, and as such is ripe for disruption by software. And I think it's more important to fix even than the healthcare system! At least in part because a large fraction of the complexity of every other system is caused by problems in that most foundational system, justice.