joe pirie,
In all fairness, I feel sorry for the Architects. I'm sure their freshman year in college, they had aspirations of designing some magnificent Verizanno Narrows Bridge or Metropolitan Art museum. You know, Frank Lloyd Wright kinda stuff. Then they graduate, go to to work for some giant firm, stuck in a cubicle, and wind up like on this job doing a single story commercial (expansion of an existing WongMart into a Superduper Center) building that has the artistic flair of a refrigerator box.
I've done some TPI in structural shops, and the in house detailers need some serious training in weld symbols and joint geometry. Some of the farm code symbols would be easier to interpret than what they come up with. Now doing this steel erection project I get to see just what you mean about the buck getting passed down and how with so many entities involved, the erection crew can really get confused on the true scope of their work.