Joetom, to go along with your post, and engineers being expected to remember procedures. Manuals were always held in the line office or the hangar. An advance in enabling information to be at the worksite, especially regarding line operations, was the reader printer. But if the engineer or mechanic didn't take all the cross references it meant back to the source or use his/her memory. Now I have seen a few, and it is a small few, companies have laptops installed on board, fewer have printers. This is a great leap forward and it will be a great money saver when these items are installed on all aircraft. Think about it all Maintenance Directors and Managers - this month's money saver - get the above installed on the whole fleet now - it is cheaper than a gear collapse.
But above all, the witholding of information whether intentionally or not is probably the underlying cause of repeat malpractices throughout the industry. Basically a method of communicating mistakes or failed shortcuts is needed. I know there are various forums, but not everybody is aware of these. I fell upon one the other day 'AMTOnline.com' for techies. I will post the repeat of this Lufthansa mishap there and hope it will be of help to others. Between us we need to publicise sites and occurrences as much as possible and hope it helps someone, somewhere.