How to bypass middlemen?

Question

I'm freelancing on a project where I'm the only programmer, and find myself at the end of a line of four middlemen, who stand between me and the actual customer, each passing my work as internal to their own company.

Communication is terrible and the requirements, made by an advertising company, are flimsy.

I've managed to communicate with people upper the ladder by keeping asking questions that made people face their ignorance, but they won't let me contact the end client since, from his end, it's pretty much a done deal.

The project will soon be over though, and I've decided it's the last time I'll be working under these conditions.

The middlemen, are pretty much useless from the perspective of shipping a product, but still necessary to me since they are the ones bringing the contracts in.

Hence I'm not thinking about crossing them altogether, which would probably end badly. Rather I'm looking for a way to make them understand I need to be part of the requirements and design process, meet the clients, and shouldn't have to go through a whole channel of clueless people each time I require some information.

Sorry for the venting :)

Any ideas ?

Answer 1

Sell the middlemen on giving some progress demos to the client then lead the client into some of the issues that you are facing during the demo.

Answer 2

Based on Bill's answer, accept his answer instead if you plan to accept my answer.

Prototyping the customer with demos which he should send feedback on is probably the best idea, the middlemen can't say no to a methodology that is being used in a lot of software companies. And if they still disagree with that I suggest you to give them a last chance or else move on and find something else, there is no use to developing a product that the the end-user probably doesn't want...