Given the mountain that the Spencer Dock developers must climb if they are to have any chance of winning, it seemed yesterday that they had eschewed crampons in favour of setting up a virtual gun battery of slide projectors to blast away the remaining obstacles.
With Bertie Ahern playing an offstage role as architecture critic, in his ostensibly unguarded dismissal of their project as "a monstrosity" - itself an unprecedented intervention by a serving Taoiseach in a live planning appeal - they brought in an established critic to laud it.
Mr Martin Pawley, who writes for the Architects Journal and World Architecture magazine and once wrote for the Guardian, did his best to sing the praises of Spencer Dock, suggesting that its "anywhere architecture" was just the ticket for present-day Dublin.
The project manager for the scheme, Mr Dermod Dwyer, had earlier turned in a bravura performance in telling the story so far, referring to the numerous consultants involved in the scheme and saying that the key to it was its world-class architect, Mr Kevin Roche.
However, while Mr Dwyer described it as "a unique model of sustainable development", Mr Pawley told one of the presiding inspectors, Mr Karl Kent, who recalled reading his "stuff" as a student, that he believed this "unclear" concept was "not a basis for making important decisions".
The critic talked at length about the global forces driving developments such as Spencer Dock, about buildings as "instruments of commerce" and "the spirit of free enterprise which sees history as something that has to be made, rather than something that has to be kept".
He condemned the "dismal accommodation" between planners and architects in London during the 1980s, permitting "groundscrapers" to rise up behind retained facades, perhaps not realising that this could equally refer to his client's Westin hotel scheme at College Street.
Although Mr Pawley suggested that the height of London's Canary Wharf tower, at 250 metres, would be "excessive" in Dublin's context, he said it had "much in common" with Spencer Dock, even though Canary Wharf had arisen out of "the absence of planning restrictions". As for the "chorus of complaint" that the proposed buildings were too tall, bland, overpowering or simply too international in style, he told the inquiry that this was inevitable because of the requirements of global capital; they were the type of buildings to be found everywhere.
In Mr Pawley's view, the scheme would "constitute an aesthetic as well as an economic breakthrough for a city for too long held back by its own past". It should be seen as "a rite of passage . . . a step towards the world city that the Dublin of the future must become".
Responding to questions from An Bord Pleanala's inspectors and from other parties at the hearing, Mr Pawley seemed less sure of his ground. At one stage, he referred to the International Financial Services Centre - likened by Mr Dwyer to "a German prison camp" - as the "IFCD".
There was also laughter when Mr Pawley conceded that the high-rise blocks would create "one or two problems" for residential areas in the vicinity. But he said householders would benefit from rising land values, even if this trend would mean that their homes would probably go.
In response to Mr Terry Durney, planning director of the Docklands Development Authority, Mr Pawley agreed that he was treating the Irish-born architect as a heroic figure, as in The Fountainhead, who had proposed a "daring" scheme to take Dublin on "an adventure".
On a number of occasions, Mr Pawley had to be prompted by the developers' planning consultant, Mr Tom Phillips, when he said in reply to questions that he had insufficient information on certain aspects of the scheme; at one stage, he admitted to being "lost for words".
All of the issues, he said, would be dealt with comprehensively "and with much more authority" by Mr Roche himself when the 77-year-old architect-hero flies in from the US to take the stand on Thursday.