We are in the midst of a renovation and the architect wants to revise the doorway to our kitchen. (If you'd like to read the whole back story, you can do that here). We have lost a bit of confidence in our architect and would like second opinions. Originally, the design called for a 36" opening between our refrigerator cabinet and oven cabinet. We have a 36" pocket door that was supposed to "disappear" into the cabinet paneling.

However, as the panels went up, it appeared the 36" opening felt too tight, so the architect proposed some alternatives which were limited by the length of pocket door framing we needed to have behind the oven cabinet. One involved a much wider 45" opening with 4.5" thick casing, which makes more sense to us at this is a heavily trafficked entrance from our mudroom/ garage/ laundry.

However, with the thicker 4.5" casing, we have run into a problem with the crown detail. Originally, we had a straight crown with a raised ceiling panel between the fridge and oven cabinets. He now wants to revise this and just have our small crown (3 5/8" high) just return into the flat, 4.5" wide casing and eliminate the raised ceiling panel. He says the raised ceiling panel now would look "fussy" with the 4.5" wide casing, which essentially be 4.5" x 4.5" post coming out of the paneling (4.5" reveal on front side, 4.5" jamb for wall thickness). Since we've lost a bit of confidence in our architect, what do other experts think? He wants to spend 4 hours of drawing time exploring this, which seems like a lot on a small detail to us, but he says the raised ceiling panel would be complicated.

Drawing of original plan with 36" opening, straight crown + raised ceiling panel

After the refrigerator cabinet went up, and we realized how tight 36" was going to feel between two cabinets that had side panels of 31" depth (25" cabinet depth plus 5" wall width):

45" opening and 4.5" casing, no wine cubbies:

Do a simple return, like this (although our door is much taller and we wouldn't have room for a wall panel above the door)?

Or, keep the straight crown with a raised ceiling panel between? Something like this, even though it has a double crown (which we wouldn't have) and no stylized, raised panel at the ceiling portion?