There is a moment in almost every creative project, usually somewhere in the middle, where the original idea becomes unrecognizable.
It doesn't happen all at once. It happens in increments. A small compromise here, a practical constraint there, a decision made in a meeting that seemed reasonable at the time. Each individual change is defensible. The sum of them is a project that no longer resembles what it was supposed to be.
What's strange is that no single person made this happen. Everyone involved was trying to protect the thing. But something got lost anyway, in the gaps between people, in the translation between intention and execution, in the distance between the idea as held and the idea as made.
I think about this constantly. The loss isn't dramatic. It's quiet and cumulative and by the time you notice it you can't point to the moment it happened.
The only protection I know is to hold the original idea somewhere it can't be touched. To have a version of it that doesn't pass through the machinery, that stays whole while everything else gets negotiated. Not as a constraint but as a compass. Something to keep checking against as the compromises accumulate.
Most tools don't help with this. They're built for execution. The holding is your problem.