You might say that, but someone who doesn't know the principles will consistently produce misguided designs, and won't understand why certain options are better.
Meetings with such a person will cause the engineers to work around them instead of being lead by them. There's also no reason such meetings have to happen everyday at the office.
Most serious advancements are produced by single contributors tackling parts of the problem. Commitees are a place of power struggle, not technical progress.
Not sure why you are talking about "someone who doesn't know the principles" to a message that explicitly says "Yes, managers need to have some part of their work in the trenches".
I've been in meetings that were power struggle without any progress, I've also been in meetings that were really useful to solve the problem, way faster than the contributors shooting in the dark because they think they too smart to dialogue. The direction of the meeting depends way more of the mentality of the participants and on their skill to solve problems smartly than of the manager. If you go to the meeting with in mind the idea that the meeting is useless, obviously, you will stir it in the wrong direction (and apparently, you are prone to jump to the first cliché conclusion, I can imagine that you will interpret any contribution in the worst way possible). It does not mean that with participants with a better mentality, the meeting would not have been 10x faster than with single contributors tackling parts of the problem.
Don't get me wrong, shitty meetings happen. But if all the meeting you've been were shitty, maybe the problem is on your side. And if you always end up with the bad manager, it may also be that, with your attitude, you are not worth the time of a good one (or not, but at least do not exclude this possibility just because you dislike it)
Meetings with such a person will cause the engineers to work around them instead of being lead by them. There's also no reason such meetings have to happen everyday at the office.
Most serious advancements are produced by single contributors tackling parts of the problem. Commitees are a place of power struggle, not technical progress.