And, FWIW, when the AD suggests specific text changes, it's often enough the desire of that AD rather than based on feedback from some other WG.
I don't see anything wrong with that. It's the ADs' job to push back on documents with technical flaws. They're supposed to use their judgments as technical experts, not just be conduits of information supplied by others.
That's fine when that is what they do. What you're hearing here is that it is not uniformly so.
Let me give you a specific case. I have a document which is at this instant in the RFC Editor's queue. It was supposed to describe the outlines of a procedure for renumbering a network without a flag day - starting with a network using prefix A and ending with a network using prefix B, what steps does one go through to transition prefixes while providing all services all the time? The key issue is that one working group had in essence said "there is a protocol designed; this is a done deal" while the operations community was shaking its head in wonder at the naivety of that position. I wanted to get the wisdom of both groups on paper in one place and make specific actionable recommendations to operational staff planning to do such a thing.
The IESG gave us a number of comments, some of which we dropped verbatim into the draft without much concern, and at least one of which sent the authors back into a fairly serious discussion amongst ourselves and resulted in a block of entirely new text. This is as you describe and how it should be.
But one comment from the IESG was that they wanted a specific paragraph added that said (in essence) "ULAs might be useful to help in renumbering", presumably by making one not need to renumber. As an aside, I don't see the real difference between a ULA and a site-local address - I think the RFC 3879 issues apply to both. But regardless, I don't see a procedural difference between changing from a ULA to some other kind of prefix or from some other kind of prefix to a ULA, and the statement that ULAs might be a third prefix that could be used by users of a site while other prefixes are being renumbered is at best conjectural and at worst a flat numbering system. The IESG statement did not address a technical flaw, was not specific, and was not actionable by a network manager who had decided to renumber his network and was looking for a procedure for doing so. And in my very private and most humble opinion, it was horse pucky. The AD simply wanted a reference to ULAs in the draft.
The good news is that I was able to argue him out of it. I asked him for something specific and actionable, in the form of a statement of exactly what way the renumbering procedure was different when renumbering from or to a ULA as against some other prefix, and told him that if he provided specific actionable text I would include it. He dropped the discussion.
The issue here is that ADs are human, with all the flaws the rest of us have. Yes, they try pretty hard to make the documents that come out of working groups "right", and they have to work pretty hard to make that happen. They also have their hobby-horses, and make comments during IESG review that should have been made "AD hat off" on the mailing list.
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