Pete A.
This is an interesting post and reveals some new information that I've not seen elsewhere.
That at least some of the American aircraft industry learned lessons from the volume manufacturers is instructive. What is interesting, and cuts to the original question posed by this thread, is that UK industry had, at the same time, the opportunity to learn the same lesson. The UK too had its shadow plants, car and other volume manufacturers, who had to go to lengths to get the engineering out of the heads of the craftsman and down onto the drawings.
The difference being that by the 1960s the American aircraft industry were building as separate components the various spacecraft of Project Apollo which all came together, and fitted, for the first time in the assembly building at Cape Kennedy. While back in the UK those first Nimrod airframes, the ones that would eventually furnish the legacy components of the MRA4, were being manufactured with as much as 4" difference between copies of the 'same' unit.
The UK caught on eventually but what a pity it didn't learn sooner from the expensive lesson it paid for in WW2.