This assumes you're fortunate enough to have a defect at the outer edge of the system. Most times, these problems are created in the initial rush of pushing something out and then tax every effort that depends on them, forever, and ever.

It's really a shame that a good percentage of these applications full of bugs and "rapidly changing and undocumented requirements" don't get scrapped and stay many decades afloat until they get replaced by another application also full of bugs and "rapidly changing and undocumented requirements".

I think that that's a very sad way of seeing things honestly.

In the past the USA put the man on the moon, today repeating the same feat looks almost impossible. I bet that a lot of managers at Boeing also think that building planes like a few decades ago looks almost impossible now.

That's a pretty huge assumption.

For instance, compare firearms prior to replaceable parts to firearms after.

Better, cheaper, easier to make (because craft was replaced with process). Some up front cost, but absolutely not a trade off, it was a huge advancement.

Of course modern process control does more or less let you relax conformance rules to reduce cost, but it's farcical to call sacrificing reasonable conformance "quality".

Arguably, the idea that quality is obviously a trade off and you can make money by letting it slide is one of the sources of rot in our society.