[fragmede]

> cognitively difficult Lego

Ah yes. Meanwhile, my friend who's a mech-e at a car company starts from scratch on every single last project, never reusing components, and also machines every component from scratch because there's no such thing as McMaster or any other vendor. When he works on a project, the physical parts never ever fit together like Lego. It's not like he'd use calipers or something to do what's called measuring (twice!) so that things fit together.

There are plenty of places to demand more rigor from people writing software before considering it engineering, but reuse of parts, and having them fit together nicely is a weird one.