I’m not disagreeing with your scenario Brian.
There is no point designing a Rolls Royce, if the customer wanted a Dacia (Other makes are available). Or spending Rolls Royce money designing a Dacia. The problems that engineers have are i) Accountants who are just ‘bean counters’ and do not comprehend the engineering process from concept (commercial product i.e. cars) / request for tender (bespoke design i.e. trains, onboard naval equipment) on through the design process via prototype to production equipment and delivery, ii) a lack of understanding of technical and programme risk by accountants and technical risk by project managers.
For only 4 years of my career was I employed by a ‘commercial product’ company. The balance was in the bespoke engineering product industry. I therefore come from the proposal - bid - contract award - design - design verification - production run - customer acceptance - delivery lifecycle of a product school. A bid manager will coordinate the costing, the technical proposal and the requirement compliance aspects of the bid among host of other things. Senior management (I’ve only worked for SMEs) will review the bid and that will include the costings by those with financial experience. But ultimately they must listen to the engineers when they say EMC and Environmental testing / compliance verification will take n hours because of x, y and z. Cutting the costs here because the accountant can not grasp why you have to do this is folly.
True story. As a Systems Engineer, I was tasked to review technical compliance of a product against the customer’s requirements. An individual had released into production sub-assemblies in order to achieve monthly output targets. I found non compliance in a number of circuits where the designer had specified an incorrect wire size. They were undersized and would not carry the required current. Result, costly re-work, missed targets and late delivery.
I highlighted risk above. That’s the art of managing the things that can wrong, how likely that is, the impact of the event and the risk mitigation actions to reduce the impact. I don’t think politicians understand that (ducks below parapet) and it requires the sort of accountant that Brian highlighted to understand it.
Going back to APT-P, which is really where this discussion started, my gut feeling based on a hunch, rather than fact, is a good idea was condemned to failure because of cost and project pressures which lead to engineering shortcuts resulting in a design that failed to meet the operator’s requirements; technical performance, reliability, availability, maintainability etc.
Q. How many MPs were/are engineers? It would be interesting to know. I’m not turning this into politics, which is prohibited for very good reasons, just curious.
and the systems were inadequately documented. 
). I was working for a multi national manufacturing company in the UK - in fact running it. Our CEO, an accountant by profession, never got his head around the indisputable fact that machines and processes sometimes break down. All his production calculations were made on the assumption of 100% machine reliability. The only way around this was to lie and tell him that the machines were running slower than they actually were which created other problems when we exceeded 100% of fictional capacity. My relationship with him, and the fact that I'd forgotten all the lies I'd told him but he hadn't was one of the reasons I opted for early retirement. So it wasn't all bad.....
