After my last post, two people agreed with Chris. Here are their stories and I don't think I will have to make the commentary on this one.
Oh Chris, that sounds awfully familiar. At one point I was the"Architect" on 7 projects at one time. My solution for meeting hell was to jump to a company doing Agile development (flat team structure, more collaboration, better communication channels). Meeting hell is a major process and organizational smell. If you really have to schedule meetings just to get to talk about an issue with your teamates, you're team is inefficient (I've been there).
Prophetic is how I would describe it. I'm going to have to inquire, but the data architect that I've been dealing with was given the position as a promotion directly from the business-client phone desks. Perhaps all he had to do to get the job with no skill, training or knowledge was be disagreeable. It's frightening for me since every meeting that I have with this non-data architect makes me disagree with him for the sake of disagreeing. Maybe I'm inline for a promotion.