"German (over)engineering" is a common term in the automotive community for that reason. As someone who has also looked at this in detail, the difference between domestic and import cars of that era was the former tended to value simple and "brute force" designs, while the latter focused on short-term optimisations and some amount of "showing off" the complexity thereof.

For another fun one, it had a mechanical fuel injection. The drive shaft to the injector had a fine-toothed spline on it, meaning you had 50 or so wrong ways to install it. Get it wrong and the engine just ran badly. The assembly had to be done blind. There must have been some trick to getting that injector on correctly, but I couldn't figure it out.

The correct way to engineer this is to have the male spline with an extra tooth and the female with a missing tooth - then it can only be assembled one way. A cost-free improvement, saving a lot of aggravation for the mechanic. (BTW, this is what Boeing does.)