Tuc,
I'm not sure I follow your point below...
It is alledged that there were 2 and 4 Stars saying airworthiness is optional
and yet it seems that in this case, whilst something was missed, MoD in the round did infact...
pay the same company again to do the work they should have done in the first place
and then
pay yet another company to do the job properly.
Whilst this potentially says something about project & contract management (your example implies MoD paid 3 times for the same thing), you could argue this does not mean they think airworthiness optional - infact quite the opposite they spent 3x the budget to get to where they needed to with respect to engineering it properly.
From the above, was the job infact eventually done properly as you state? If so this is at odds with the statement airworthiness was optional - it sounds more like a debate about which team should be responsible for what, and the issues this can create.