Hmmmm...this was obviously written by an engineer.
You're right about our expectations though. If we don't hold the engineering community's feet to the fire occasionally they'll design whatever works best for
them and not for us.
Case in point...there's a large equipment manufacturer that I no longer have anything to do with because of their attitude toward the product they produce...and the customer that uses it. We bought a loader from them, brand new and state of the art, that spent most of it's time sitting idle while techs chased down the problems that made it useless to me. Electrical, hydraulic, electronic, engine, gearing, tracks...you name it and it was giving us problems.
Sure, it was covered under warranty but warranty doesn't pay for my down time and the resultant lost production. I had it on a two week trial and of the eleven working days it never completed an entire day without a slowdown, a breakdown, or a melt down. We had so many hydraulic fires from chafed wiring bundles and dripping hydraulic fluid that we designated one of the landing rats as the fire bottle guy and kept him on standby.
They finally got a factory rep out to the woods, an engineer of course, and without ever looking at the machine or reviewing the repairs done by the techs, he said " You loggers expect way too much out of the machinery you buy. These things were designed by educated people with engineering credentials and they know what they're doing. You're just going to have to get used to the idea that machinery isn't perfect and that some flaws are to be expected.. We believe that the end user bears a certain responsibility for field testing on the new models we sell."
I have neither the time, the interest or the resources to do "field testing" for a manufacturer.
All I was asking was a machine that would do what it was advertised as being able to do. Apparently I was asking too much.
I told the factory rep to leave. I sent the loader back. When they asked me why I told them why. It was poorly engineered. I'm sure that the engineers had plenty of self serving excuses why that machine was so useless. I'm sure the excuses make sense to the engineers. They just didn't make sense to anyone else.
Are engineers always totally at fault when something isn't right? Of course not. But it's a good place to start looking.