They specifically asked the NRC if the new rule would apply to Votgle and were told it would not since the design was certified prior to the rule.Where do you see that? According to the Rod Adams piece you linked above, the final design certification document for Vogtle included that new rule and it was completed in 2011:
"As it turned out, meeting the new rule ended up requiring three more iterations on the design document and raised several issues of contention including concerns about the revised heat transfer capacity, concerns about the innovative shield building construction process devised, and concerns about the validity of the testing regime for the steel concrete composite modules that make up the shield building.
Those and other related issues were not completely resolved until the issuance of the final design certification document in late 2011, more than 2.5 years after the PSC had approved the project using the previously approved design revision."
In 2014 Westinghouse was still touting high confidence in affordable, predictable construction for the AP1000:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141225195417/http://westinghou...
From the outset, the AP1000 PWR was designed to reduce capital costs and to be economically competitive with contemporary fossil-fueled plants. This requires lower overnight construction costs and higher confidence in the construction schedule.
The AP1000 plant reduces the amount of safety-grade equipment required by using passive safety systems. Consequently, less Seismic Category I building volume is required to house the safety equipment (approximately 45 percent less than a typical reactor). The AP1000 plant’s modular construction design further reduces the construction schedule and the construction risks, with work shifted to factories with their better quality and cost control as well as labor costs that are less than those at the construction site.
This also allows more work to be done in parallel. The use of heavy lift cranes enables an “open top” construction approach, which is effective in reducing construction time.
With new computer-modeling capabilities, Westinghouse is able to optimize and choreograph the construction plan of an AP1000 unit in advance by simulation. The result is a very high confidence in the construction schedule.
If the airplane strike rule had made that impossible, they shouldn't have been advertising the impossible. I'm not even confident that the airplane strike rule bears particular responsibility for the bad outcomes of this project, because large construction projects often run over schedule and budget even if the NRC never comes near them.