> So you're saying Chernobyl wasn't caused by hurried and ill-prepared testing of a safety feature they failed to verify during initial startup and instead had to do years later during regular operation?

I'll say it wasn't. You're right about the issues; however, the root cause comes from a culture that views any form of problem as a personal fault. These guys were just the end result of a long list of fails. When you treat any form of failure as personal, there is perverse incentive to ignore or hide faults until all of it lines up, ie the Swiss-cheese model. The people running Chernobyl shouldn't have been in that position in the first place: untrained, ill-informed, and under-the-gun to perform.