> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.

for many machine shops the level of physical risk is > 0, often by a large amount.

making widgets for X means handling large quantities of red hot metal; even simple stuff that's easy to get your hands around often shoots tons of oil, gas, and metal shavings in volumes that could hurt or cripple people.

if my dev VM gets borked I reboot or revert it, but factories aren't so simple