""You're the expert. What do you recommend?" It didn't matter that there were ten people in the room with PhDs and decades of experience;"
dear lord, get your stupidity out of the industry, go.... mop floor or something.
You are the expert. They are not. The primary difference seems to be they are educated enough to realize that it makes them an expert in their fields, not all fields. where as you seem to thing PhD = 'Knows everything'
" who could think quickly on his feet"
whoa whoa whoa. You didn't have the best solution based on you information before the presentation?
You, and people like you, are exactly why this industry isn't maturing into an actual engineering field.
Just becasue you are standing up there presenting as if you are an expert, when by you own admission you are not and expert, doesn't mean others lack the professionalism you do and go around pretend to be an expert but really foisting there expert advice on to others like you do.
This, this is why Software and IT needs a professional engineer exam. So we can weed out non experts like you from critical decsions.