[simonh]

Developers, developers, developers was about the things those developers would create. The equivalent here would be engineers, engineers, engineers.

You need to use materials to make something, and that thing needs to fulfil a purpose. But until you have an objective and try to make the thing and work out what the thing is, you don’t even know what your requirements are. That’s why engineering projects like Apollo and the shuttle drove materials science advances.

If you put the materials first you run the risk of creating a carbon fibre composites company to make giant space rocket hulls, just as the people actually making the rockets decided for their project they’d use steel.