I'm reminded of, of all things, WW2 tanks.

The Russians built a huge volume of very low-quality tanks, expected to go for only a few hundred miles, and to win through superior numbers. Their crews were poorly trained. The designers suggested easy-win improvements, but the brass blocked the changes as it would have impacted production rates.

The Germans built the best-engineered tank the world had ever seen, but its design tradeoffs made it ineffective, and it arrived too late in the war.