This work style, however, is not valued at all and is actively suppressed by "flat", non-expert hierarchies that reward people for being popular and sloppy.
It works for web companies because errors have no consequences for them and the web has turned into a gigantic tabloid anyway.
A painter uses rules of thumb all of the time, yet his work is entirely dependent on chemical engineers getting their science and formulas right. Artistic painting is just one of many uses of paint (and probably its most approximate), but both the painter and the industrial product engineer need the same quality assurances regarding their colors.
Hardware needs to be solid to allow all kinds of software the freedom to be built.
MRSs would enable much more of the formal verification parts to be generated.
I've had a very angry product manager because a feature took almost a second to load. I told him that we could make it load much faster but it would be almost a week of work and he should validate the feature with customers before we invest in that. "Of course we need this feature! It's core to the product!". So we spent a week. It worked realty nicely and scaled pretty well. In the next 12 months the feature changed completely twice because customers didn't find it useful. Then it was removed entirely and then we had to bring it back because the sales team liked it for demos. All that iteration was required to find what the market needed, not fit technical reasons, except for the performance work which was entirely wasted because it all got redone after the first user feedback.