Carpionato Corp.’s failed attempt to build an immense commercial and residential complex in Tiverton may best be remembered as an exercise in how not to win friends and influence people.

Any shot the developer may have had early on to convince a hesitant town that this project might be a good fit ultimately withered under a cloud of suspicion.

Despite Tiverton’s track record of opposition to such grandiose schemes, the developer actually seemed to gain early traction. The planning board labored for months, then years, opposition audiences, while vocal, were small, and there were murmurings that this might finally be the one. And despite knowing the grief they would get, the planners pushed an amended plan along to the town council — Carpionato would get changes in the town comprehensive plan that it needed; Tiverton would get concessions too and some semblance of control.

But it was as though Carpionato had not listened to a word. It’s “my way or the highway” for them, critics said, and the developer did little to dispel the reputation:

People believed they saw it in:

• The way the principals and their lawyers sat in silence through the many long hearings, neither debating nor offering compromise;

• The lack of vigorous sales pitch. Towns like to be courted, be offered things like free public spaces, money or promises of wonderful things to come. Instead, an image developed that Tiverton ought to consider itself lucky to have the likes of Carpionato there at all;

• The lack of specifics. What sort of tenants might be coming? Too soon to say. What will these buildings look like? That will come later. How can this place succeed when nearby malls resemble ghost towns? We know our business.

• The utter refusal to give an inch. Certain things were clearly important to Tiverton and these were spelled out in the planners’ recommendations. People — among them police, fire, schools — were adamant in their objection to a Main Road entrance, for instance, and they wanted some control over aesthetics, lighting, signs and historic places.

Carpionato rejected all of this outright in a last-minute set of amendments. It was as though all of the planners’ efforts, all of the resident testimony, was so much hot air.

That was the last straw. Any friends the developer may have counted on kept lips zipped as throngs gathered at the high school waving a sea of yellow ‘Vote No” signs.

Carpionato’s vice president said in a letter this week that “Any development … is a negotiation.” That came way too late to salvage this plan.