My personal peeves are the RFPs that read -- between the lines -- as "any supplier but X" or, conversely, "suppliers other than X need not apply".

Even when the RFPs don't actually read that way, the fact of the matter is that clients often do have a single supplier in mind, and everyone else is wasting their time.

We rarely respond to them.

We also see a lot of organizations preparing RFPs where they've gone too far; I suspect they think they can save money by spelling out what they need in overwhelming detail, but what they end up doing is cheating themselves out of the very expertise they're looking to hire.

The most bizarre RFP we've seen lately was from a _very_ large, very profitable organization that needed a web site design; they'd already built the back-end, and established the structure.

Never mind that this meant they viewed web site design as a mere "make it pretty" exercise, completely ignoring the role of user interaction, information architecture or design-as-problem-solving. This was a sign of a potentially-problematic client all by itself, but not necessarily an insurmountable issue, given time.

The show-stopper, though, was that they insisted on designs being submitted with the response to the RFP -- including Photoshop files, HTML and CSS, although they claimed they didn't need to be final. Yeah, right, you're going to bid on a really large job with some rough concepts you've mocked-up on a napkin; that'll get you the job.

Oh yeah, these designs were to be done at no cost or risk to them, and submitting them meant they owned them.

So they own your work, you do it on spec, and they can hand it over to the lowest bidder for production (meaning you've worked for nothing). Unbelievable.

Try that with a plumber some time and let me know how it works out...