[aggie]

> The design can be iterated on and experimented with...

All you're arguing here is that engineers should do design. Do you think it's likely that an engineer (at an equivalent salary no less) would be better than a designer at design? Outside of small start-ups, your argument holds no water unless you want to say division of labor should be avoided.

> ...as long as you can ship.

You don't need a shippable product to learn and develop. Iteration and experimentation can be done more efficiently with design methods such as prototyping. Why should an engineer build something before gathering evidence that it will work?