No, the overall design is not up to the engineer. The owner who is paying for a building (constructed legally) has to conform to local buiding codes. Those codes give minimum requirements.
The owner can then opt to only use minimum, or pay some extra bucks for something that is stronger and safer. Right now, the minimum is 60 lbs. per foot in my town, and 80 lbs. per foot at my Adirondacks property. That being said, I've never built with less then 100 lbs. The cabin I just built in the Adirondacks it 140 lbs. per foot. I did that because I don't go there all winter and won't be there to check snow on the roof.
So, at the outset the design choice is up to the person paying for the building - and NOT the engineer.
The engineer is simply given the task of - designing a building to handle X amount of wind load, and roof weight load. That's all. The engineer can decide what design to use only withing the demands that are asked for.
Subsquently the engineer is blameless - unless he designs an 80 lb. roof and it comes down with 60 lbs.
Back to codes, they usually do not take snow-buildup over time into account. Just worst-case scenario for one storm at a time. Now, a code-officer CAN take those factor into account. Officers are given a lot of lee-way to change code when needed.
On the same suject, I have to laugh when people build in "100 year flood-plains. Then get flooded out 2 years later and complain. They don't seem to understand that "100 years" means it can occur anytime - not just 100 years from "now."
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Today's Featured Article - Restoration Story: 1929 McCormick-Deering 10-20 - by Randal Simmon. On July 4th 1998 my dad and I was sitting on the front porch when he said that he was going to sell his two 10-20's to a junk man. He said that the junk man was going to give him $500 for both of them but he hadn't received the money for them yet. So I went into the house and wrote him a check for $500 and bought them myself and said now they are mine. He had bought them about five years before thinking that he was going to restore them himself. After five years sitting in the barn, he changed h
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