[pluto9]

This can happen even without regulation, simply because the company doesn't want the risk of using a less-than-fully-tested design.

I used to work at a kiosk manufacturer that would do the complete hardware design, fabricate it, put it on a truck and drive it around the city for a week straight, and then make sure nothing was broken. This was to ensure that it wouldn't break during shipping to the customer. After that, not even a zip tie was allowed to be changed.

In our case, our development process was such that the software engineers didn't get ahold of it until afterwards. One time we built a machine with an internal cable that was too long and so its baud rate was too slow to perform to the customer's spec. Rather than incur the cost of re-testing with a different cable, the company spent two years trying to get the customer to accept a slower machine. Fun times.