> you give the owner all of the tools they might need to do whatever they might want with their equipment
Are you quite confident that is how engineering works?
Are you quite confident that is how engineering works?
For example, a well engineered plane allows the pilots to control the fuel flow to engines, but also does not allow pilots to dump fuel into the passenger compartment. Much engineering goes into, how to isolate the toxic chemicals of fuel or other fluids/gases away from the passenger compartment. So you have freedom, but you also have constraints.
Likewise, a well engineered plane probably should allow pilots to fly the plane according to their needs, rather than overriding their inputs as they fight to point the nose up while the plane decides that no you really want the nose down right now. Of course the pilots should've disengaged MCAS, but in a crisis it's bad engineering to force operators to remember which unhelpful/murderous system needs to be disabled in order to avoid catastrophe. The system took too much agency away from the operators, and violated the principle as espoused by that comment you're quoting.
In this specific case I imagine the plant wasn’t physically capable of dosing at that rate - and there should be alarms if the outgoing water is outside the desired operating parameters.