Yes, he is a bit of a micro manager. He expects to be included in all design/architecture meetings and expect us not to start/reschedule unless he is there. He wants to review all design/architecture before allowing the project to start. He will randomly call out existing code in our repos and expect us to rewrite it to his standard. He has had us rewrite existing production applications (even though business is happy with it) because the design/code is not to his standard.
Keeping a close eye on me is probably correct. We have had our differences in design philosophies. I prefer simpler design while he likes using all the latest and greatest technology for coding. He always believes his design is the correct way and gets his way since he's the highest person with technical knowledge (CTO is not technical).
The CTO seems publicly happy with him since the CTO leans on him more and more. He is doing his VP work during the day, coding for projects on the evening and weekends. Some services, he completely owns. He codes, QA, and deploys them without any other people's inputs.
The only person with an architect title is the VPs right hand man. They were hired at the same time (10+ years ago). The architect never questions the VPs design/decisions.
Yes, its hard gated. This project has been delayed 3 weeks already from starting because the VP has not have the time to approve the designs, etc.