1. A quarrel happened at a transition assessment
Company T, a consultant company for construction design, had finished the transition assessment to 2000 version. Due to characteristics of its sector, the company excludes 7.5.2 clause: validation of processes for production and service provision.
But at the assessment, an assessor commented that the company couldn't exclude the clause, because in future its customers might require the application of the clause.
And moreover he added revalidations (7.5.2 e)) of delivered design outputs also might be future customer requirements. He said therefore the exclusion was not appropriate.
The company brought forward a counterargument that revalidations referred to 7.5.2 e) clause were not revalidation of products, but of control conditions for special processes.
If customers require validations of design outputs in future, it would have to be handled according to requirements of 7.3.6 clause, not of 7.5.2 clause. Therefore the exclusion was right.
Finally the assessor admitted the exclusion reluctantly.

2. My comments on the quarrel
(1) Characteristics of the company
Design and development validation of 7.3 6 clause is validation of design outputs and validation of processes for production and service provision of 7.5.2 clause is validation of special processes. The both validations are completely different things and have no direct relations. The assessor had confused the both. His confusion happened by special characteristics of design consultant company.
As a design consultant company, basically the company has no production function referred to 7.5 clause of ISO9001: 2000.
Sometimes only binding documents papers of design outputs may be considered as production function.
The results of bindings are easily verified. No special processes!
And future customer requirements for making binding processes special processes are completely unconceivable!

(2) Advice from TC176
"ISO9001 for Small Businesses: What to do: Advice from ISO/TC176" says about 73.6 that in some cases, the product is the design itself, for example the outputs from designers or design consultants. In such cases, customer acceptance of sketches, scale models, or virtual reality computer simulations of the finished product may be used for validation.
It is acceptable feedback from customers of results of designs like most software design do.

(3) Fruitless quarrels The assessor committed primitive misinterpretations and it cost the company fruitless quarrels with high sacrifices of assessment fee.