Comment by triggercut

An unfortunate reality is that wayfinding is usually a late stage item of scope. The norm is that budget attributed to those types of items has been progressively raided over the course of the project to cover for deficiencies and lack of allowances in others - certainly not good practice, but extremely common.

The flawed negotiation is that you "push it to opex", which, as we know, especially in the US, means it is unlikely to happen. So what originally might have been designed is scaled back. But yes, as with this example, there are cases where only minor tuning is needed once something is in place that is hard to simulate before hand (e.g. the audibility of PA announcements).