It is said that the Greek sculptor Polykleitos was making a statue once, and people constantly instructed him about how it should look (in some variations, it was an official committee). He made such a statue, while in secret, making another the way he wanted. In the end, he showed the people both statues, and explained the difference between his creation and theirs.
Documentaries
Dinosaur Revolution would have been a purely animal-centric animated Edutainment Show, with the entire series consisting of highly anthropomorphic prehistoric animals doing their stuff, with no obtrusive Narrator or any Talking Heads. Then, to explain the science behind the stories, there would have been a companion show in which we see real life paleontologists, well, explaining stuff. This was deemed too "risky", so they added "sparse" (yet at times still obnoxious and unneeded) narration, and cheesy holograms of talking scientists and various Stock Footage cips now interrupt the stories.
Fan Fiction
Beta readers in general. The idea behind a beta reader (or simply beta) is that you hand out your story to someone else and have them fix the grammar, spelling and possibly plot, but that also means you take responsibility for anything your beta does.
Fanfiction.net has their own requirements for beta readers because of this reason.
And the fixed chapter had Cave Johnson's trademark lemon rant randomly inserted.
AN OK GUYZ IVE BEEN THINKIN AN A GUY NAME LOGIC EDTOR WANTS TO EDIT MY STORY AN MAKE IT MORE BETTER. BUT I SEED LOTS OF TV SHOWS WERE THEY CHANG STUFF THEN PEPOLE DONT LICK IT NO MORE SO I WAS WORRY BOUT THE CHANGES THEN I HAD IDEEA! I WILL PUT BOTH TEH UNCUT AN UNSENSORED VERSHUN AN LOGIC CORRECSHUN SO YOU CAN DESIDE WICH ONE YOU LIKE YURSELF!
EVRYONE WINS!
Magazines
This brought Cracked down. Tabloid owner Dick Kulpa bought the mag, and as a cost-cutting measure, turned most artists' and writers' pays to flat-rate instead of by page. As a result, many veteran writers/artists left, such as Walter Brogan and John Severin. Kulpa was literally running the mag from his kitchen table, plastering it with tabloid-like covers, constantly delaying releases, and overall ruining the mag through his lack of experience. After that, an anthrax attack briefly stopped things. Finally, the mag was re-tooled as a "lad mag" like Maxim for three issues before dying and coming back to life as a highly popular humor website.
Puppet Shows
A positive example of executive meddling is with the creation of Thunderbirds. The production company exec, Lew Grade, liked the show so much that he demanded that the half-hour show have hour-long episodes. As a result, Gerry Anderson's company had to, at least initially, pad the time with additional plot twists and character development, which gave the series a sophistication that made the show a cult classic.
Further executive decisions resulted in the cancellation of Thunderbirds after The Film of the Series failed to perform. This did, however, allow Anderson to develop his next show, Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, which gathered a significant cult following of its own, if not as big as that of Thunderbirds. Grade made a less positive decision concerning Anderson's final Supermarionation show The Secret Service. Each episode featured Father Unwin, voiced by Stanley Unwin, bamboozling people with Unwin's trademark "Unwinese" doubletalk. Unfortunately, when Grade first heard this, he cancelled the show with only 13 episodes in the can, on the grounds that viewers wouldn't understand Unwinese — despite the fact that they weren't meant to.
Radio
The Howard Stern Show: Executives were trying to change Stern's vision of his show since his first day on the air. It's generally agreed upon by critics and fans that him fighting and being able to do his show the way he wanted completely changed the way morning radio shows were presented. However, whether or not Stern going through the actual process of fighting these battles was entertaining leads to a case of Broken Base.
While discussing the constant format battles in his Private Parts biography, he brings up several interesting anecdotes. For a Crowning Moment of Funny, when airing on WNBC, the station required a quick station identification before every commercial, which Howard dutifully agreed to do. But later, his program supervisor came to him and told him that the station wanted him to say "WNBC" with a quasi-Southern drawl, emphasizing the "N", specifically (Something like "W-Ee~ee~en-B-C!"). Naturally, the next day, Stern featured a skit with himself and another cast member playing the role of gay men auditioning for a WNBC program, debating over which of their ridiculously overexaggerated drawls was most suitable.
Later on, he had a female program manager who was willing to go along with just about any idea he wanted, as long as it was planned out in advance, something he himself admitted was a perfectly reasonable request. If he wanted to have such-and-such skit, great; just pencil it in at X time on Y day, so listeners know to expect it on a regular basis. But at that point, Stern was still in that strange embryo phase between Small Name, Big Ego and Protection From Editors, which led to him arguing that he should be allowed to air skits and segments whenever he felt like it; in this case, he got away with it, but one wonders how many other supervisors there were willing to work with his ideas and get them into a structured format, as opposed to the majority he talks about in the book who were simply looking to hammer the censorship button and make his life hell.
The creators of the Planescape and Al-Qadim settings for Dungeons & Dragons have both commented that they were fortunate TSR bosses expected a different setting to be the Next Big Thing, and so were breathing down those developers' necks, and leaving them to do whatever they wanted.
Theme Parks
Disney Theme Parks went through a period of this in the Eisner-Era. Among the results are shutting down the Subs for the first time, the entire fiasco surrounding Journey into Imagination, the infamous cost-cutting that went into California Adventure, the Paris Studios park and Hong Kong Disneyland, and other problems.
And that's not even mentioning the whole Horizons incident, which evidently caused a ban on even mentioning that Horizons ever existed until quite recently.
Parodied in the series Revisioned: Activision, which has an executive trying to force two writers to remake the Atari game Kaboom for modern audiences. At one point, he even flips through a guide of "Screenwriting for Meddlers".
Caused a literal Creator Breakdown in the production of the series finale of There Will Be Brawl: Matthew Mercer had planned to release it on Christmas Day, but The Escapist (the host site) suddenly announced that it would be released a week early, causing Mercer to scramble so much to finish filming and editing that he ended up on bed rest with a pinched nerve. It ended up having to be released on New Year's Day.
Because Google has threatened to cut funding for TV Tropes, many pages are getting deleted or are up for deletion (mostly numerous "Real Life" pages, such as the High Octane Nightmare Fuel page).
Other
Early in World War II, Messerschmitt had a workable design for a jet-propelled interceptor that would theoretically wreak havoc on the Allies' air forces. They called it the Me 262. Fortunately for the free world, Hitler decided that what the Luftwaffe really needed wasn't an interceptor, but a tactical fighter-bomber. This arguably resulted in the Me 262's entry into the war being delayed until 1944, at which point it was too late.
