To put it back in the analogy, building materials cost only a penny, and the builders themselves work for free. If the building falls over, you can rebuild it again and again at little to no cost.
The architects on the other hand, account for almost all the cost and time.
Which means that it is cheaper to quickly sketch the design freehand, and have the builders make a skyscraper based on the partial design every two minutes to observe how it falls down. Ten scrap buildings are cheaper than an hour of the architect's time. No sense wasting that time measuring, carefully drawing angles and lines and then inspecting the blueprints to be sure that the load bearing walls are actually attached to something. If it falls down, no harm is done and the sketch can be touched up a bit there. If it doesn't fall down, then everything is good and the sketching continues.
Rather than exotic metals, consider what things would be like if the shop were making water fountain sculptures. There would be no harm in running water through those fountains while they're being shaped and aligned. Each piece is not only allowed to, but actually encouraged to vary from the others like it. Cheap materials are flagrantly wasted, but expensive time is saved
Of course, it all starts to break down once the system becomes complex enough that it simply can't be done with sketches, eyeballs, estimations and hand-waving. After that fuzzy point of crossover, it becomes more expensive to sketch roughly and rework than it would have been to plan accurately from the beginning. Unfortunately, it seems to me that that point is also well on its way to complexity so high that it can't really be designed accurately, like a city rather than a building.
In reply to Re^4: "Bah! Scrumbug!" (Lessons from the scrap-bin)
by SuicideJunkie
in thread "Bah! Scrumbug!" (Lessons from the scrap-bin)
by locked_user sundialsvc4
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