It looks like you and jroseattle are demonstrating the main two competing views about how to approach new software projects: 1) deterministic, controlled, strong planning, avoidance of failure vs 2) nondeterministic, flexible, embracing uncertainty, expect and handle failure gracefully. There are many different versions of this in technology: one big expensive server vs many commodity servers, waterfall vs agile, ACID vs BASE, BigCorp in-house R&D vs distributing risk across startups.

Large parts of the technology world operate according to the latter model, and they do so for a variety of very valid reasons. Obviously, the government and government contractors do not.

jroseattle's comment presents a speculative model for how to apply a distributed, fault-tolerant model to this kind of technology project.