Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion. However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation." This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts. After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physi…
For sure, but how do you know?
If it's only via:
> The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process.
...then I worry about the efficiency of improvement. Sure, manufacturing equipment salespeople definitely are in touch with what consumers want ("Everyone is buying lamb now, buy our new breed of high-birth-rate sheep!"), but that's under the assumption that manufacturers never improve/iterate on their own processes ("Our farm is competitive because we've found that feeding sheep our special high-protein diet increases birth dates").
Rather than relying on the consumers-experimenters-manufacturers game of telephone, it seems likely to me that many manufacturing improvements have been driven by marginal tweaks/improvements made on the factory floor.