UML Considered Harmful

At work, we use Unified Modeling Language (UML) to document our designs. I think UML has its place as part of the design process and documentation, but I believe that UML is not in itself sufficient to document a non-trivial design. I have been to numerous design reviews where a few UML class and sequence diagrams are the only description of the design. I find these inadequate to communicate more than a vague idea of the overall design.

For a complete description of the design, I feel that a full design document with words and pseudocode is a requirement. I get the impression that UML diagrams are being used as a way to say that a design is documented (for documentation requirements like CMMI) without really providing any meaningful documentation.

If anyone is out there, how is your company documenting design? Do you think your process works?