Whining? Is that how engineers see criticism and complaint about their designs?
Quite frankly I don't care about the needs of engineers. They have one job and that's to design something that I want and can use to make my business more profitable and my life easier.
They don't like "whining?" "Take whatever we design, pay your bill, and shut your mouth?"...is that the attitude?
Whining? Wow.
Philbert is correct. There are many here who clearly have no idea of what goes on in a company that manufactures products, and believe engineers have the freedom to build whatever they want if only they were good enough. You really think engineers are the ones setting the parts cost limits? That's funny. It is usually dictated by management
and most of all by customers.
Designing a product requires balancing the needs of a lot of people, and usually someone feels the compromise should have been made differently to optimize it for their particular needs (of the moment).
You are wrong about the
"one job and that's to design something that I want and can use to make my business more profitable and my life easier" part.
On the day someone is buying the product they want it to be less expensive.
On the day you are using the product you want it to have the best performance/comfort/ease of use.
After a while you want it to last as long as possible.
On the day something went wrong you want it to be easy to repair.
And that is just one customer - the next one has slightly different tastes, management has limited development budgets, time and parts costs, and marketing/sales has usually neglected to tell the engineers about what the customer actually wants.
As for the whining about product designs - have you ever read the chainsaw forum on AS? Heck, we have become an nation of whiners.
Anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I am not ashamed of my work. I don't presume to tell those who spend their careers out in the woods dropping trees how they should be doing their jobs, because it is not my area of expertise and I can't really know how it is done because I haven't lived it. Just as when you read posts by those without experience it jumps right out at you, the same is true for me when I read posts by people whining about this brand or that, or guessing why something is the way it is.
This thread started with me asking about a very specific aspect of saw construction that I was curious about, and wondering if anyone had any specific knowledge about why it was done that way. There was a little relevant discussion, but the thread immediately devolved into intentional disruption and axe-grinding by the usual crowd, along with a few folks volunteering their lack of understanding, so there's not much more to be gained from it.