'Bob Viking' - I was thinking more of aeronautical design engineers and production engineers, supervising from a project engineering/management perspective. RAF engineering officers are more oriented towards maintaining the operational equipment, not generally towards design. Of course good design should include listening to & taking on board, where possible, the views of the operational engineers. (A very common users complaint in all spheres is that designers don't think enough about the ****y maintenance aspects.)
These are quite different disciplines - and several disciplines of engineers will be involved in the design and construction, just as in maintenance. The views of the direct users, the aircrew, should also be of interest of course, for similar reasons - the designers may well not understand operational challenges as well as they'd like.
Any significant engineering project involves a lot of compromises.- that is one of the major challenges of project engineering, trying to find the best practical balance of compromises. This also means disappointing as few people as possible, you hope ! (Virtually no-one will be totally happy, especially the main design engineers. They can always see the opportunities they had to forego because of lack of time, lack of information or lack of cash. That's engineering.)
I hope that helps.
I am glad there is now some comment on the two year tour. It has long seemed to me a most inefficient way to run the organisation, given the length of time required to get properly up to speed on any complex operation and the lead time involved in making effective changes. For much of my engineering career three to four year tours of duty were the norm, except where 'hardship' postings were involved. Those were either shorter by design or compensated otherwise.
Do many of today's RAF personnel really want to move every two years? Where to - there aren't the wide choices there once were!