[perl4ever]

I think it's kind of like the "risk homeostasis" thing people talk about. If you have really good engineers, then you don't just let them design the greatest vehicle possible, you ask them to cut costs from that design. And because they're really good, they can make things work that others couldn't, and so they get pushed harder, until something goes wrong on a large scale, because there were tradeoffs that couldn't be eliminated.