> I’ve been part of some projects where someone external to the team went on a crusade to shut our work down because they disagreed with it. When we pushed through, shipped it, and it worked well they lost a lot of credibility.

I went through this at a corporate job not too long ago for the first time. One of the more insane things I've dealt with so far in my career. I know life isn't always sunshine and rainbows, but up to that point I'd never seen that level of naked, antisocial self-interest in an org that was ostensibly created to allow people to cooperate toward solving some problem for our customers. Call me naive, but it was really disheartening.