this idea that every single step anyone takes or nut & bolt wasting away in astore always needs costing and charging (to someone or some budget or other) irks me.
During the design process you also have budgets of weight. You start with cutting kilo's and end with trying to cut grams. Just another type of beans :-). Designers have to irk quite a lot before they get it right :-).
really, not exactly proactive forward thinking govt.
You can operate pro-actively and count beans at the same time. To survive in business you need to do both. Reminds me of Sir John Harvey-Jones... he would have loved talking to you.
And what better exercises and real life experience & training is there than being out there and doing stuff.. rather than twiddling fingers in offices ...
It is hard to design and manufacture aircraft out in the open :-). Engineers can be quite jealous of pilots :-). That's why quite a few fly outside office hours.
... it could have been many years for the full facts of metal fatigue's random scatter to be fully accounted for in design.
There was quite a lot of knowledge on metal fatique already. Alas, in ship design. You can take a look at Liberty ship hatch design and compare that to Comet window design. Interesting parallels, and of course also a number of differences (thin vs fat plate, riveting vs welding(funny the Liberties were an early change from riveting into welding)).