Thank you for your thoughts. I think pico-iterations would be wonderful, and that is the big problem -- we meet twice a week (he has dedicated 4hrs a week and sometimes not even that.) Way too much time goes by before we test whether the build-out matches the vision. This makes it more disheartening because there is often so much wasted work.
However, I'm glad this worked out well for you -- I am going to try to split the 4hours more evenly, perhaps into at-least a daily review. Part of the problem is he seems to think we are all wrong in requiring all these reviews, rather we should simply implement the vision rather than just talking about it over and over.