Review-n-Document Cycle for Quality

I'm having my first exp. of CMMi Level-5 processes.
I accept that in an organisation of the size of IBM, and on top of it an account of the size AT&T (the last count at the latest party was around 700 ! ), the documents are absolutely necessary - to preserve the knowledge/expertise in the domain...but what I felt about this recent incident was just an over-kill to it.

There was this script which was having some problems; upon investigating, we found out that we needed to add just one more switch to the script while launching it.But to introduce such a minor change, we had to go through rounds of proposal docs-review docs-testing docs. Oh lord, so much of fuss just to add a switch !

The result was the time taken to implement the change.Even after 1.5 months, we have not deployed the change ! In this whole time, I even went on Holi leave to my home,Delhi; came back and started to work on some other issues.In the process of testing the script, I accidently filled-up all the disk-space on the dev machine.I had to generate a junk directory-structure with some junk data.I wrote a small C program to do just that - but one wrong parameter and I filled some 10 GB of junk into my home dir !
I think there was absolutely no need for such vigorous testing of the script.
Somebody told me a wonderful thing about this whole blabbing of Quality-Processes:

"This whole concept of Quality-Process has been invented by some mediocre people to employ-n-pay other mediocre people !" So true !!