[mystified5016]

Well, yes but.

Mechanisms like this can be extremely difficult to design. You have to go through many iterations to tune the performance and ensure it's reliable over a vast range of conditions. Then you have to do it all over again to make the design mass-manufacturable. The design is extremely sensitive to the quality of the input materials and could outright fail if not manufactured just so.

It requires a lot of education and ""real"" engineering. It takes a lot of very expensive engineer hours.

Meanwhile the digital equivalent is a weekend project at best, and can be designed by just about anyone with half a brain and one working eye.

I agree that mechanical mechanisms are almost always much more elegant and simple than a digital equivalent, but given that the digital versions exist and perform nearly as well (if not better), the pure mechanical solution just isn't practical.

I'm not entirely sure if this is a good or bad thing. It certainly feels like we've lost an art form, but are we simply moving from flint arrows to steel, or something more like the loss of Roman concrete?

[kube-system]

I think it's more like Roman concrete. There are many creative engineering possibilities that simply aren't used anymore because there are so many jellybean parts on the shelf that can brute-force a solution without much creativity.

Much in the same way, I find many software engineers these days don't actually know much about how a computer or a computer network works.

Engineering is starting to become less about being masters of the physical world, and more like a discipline in gluing blocks together.