[jpasden]

"bike shedding," AKA "Parkinson's law of triviality":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality

"Parkinson observed and illustrated that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant spent the majority of its time with pointless discussions on relatively trivial and unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the less-trivial proposed design of the nuclear power plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task to criticize constructively."