Earlier quoted context omitted.
The engine failure was minor, true. That's the design point: if engines have a firm ceiling to reliability it's better to design so that one or two can fail than to put all the eggs in a basket. And indeed, the 32/33 engine set was enough to hit the trajectory targets, so that worked great. But I don't think you can characterize a burned-through flap as minor. Once there's a hole in something like that, the fact that…
> But I don't think you can characterize a burned-through flap as minor... In prod, a localized flap burn-through would be a Major Incident. Vs. in dev...what competent manager would be bothered if the some bleeding-edge beta code dropped 10% of packets the first time that it faced a full-load test?
And sure, it's good to find the design flaws in "dev" vs. "prod", but it's still bad to have them.
In this case, we don't really know what the expected performance of that flap shielding was. Maybe it was a kludge and they were just hoping the glue held together, maybe it was a finished design they just thought they were validating. The latter is a much (!) bigger problem than the former.