I find most if not all of these type of roles are few steps removed from what actually happening and have no idea on the day to day reality of how good/bad a codebase is and how fragile your infrastructure is, yet they have the final say in deciding the fate of those systems and those who work on them.
What happened to result in this type of a hierarchical system that places the decision making process in the hand of the least-informed. Genuine question, how does this do a _company_ any good?
Therefore, any decision on resource allocation to different projects must necessarily involve input from people who are a few steps removed from what's actually happening.
Do you think there's a way around this?