Your own answer circles right back to the problem I'm talking about:

> and it had better be reliable - imagine if it omits the wrong alarms!

This is entirely based on the premise that an error due to omitting the wrong alarm is worse than an error based on including too many alarms. That right there is lawyerthink. Also, these priorities don't conflict as you say, they just take different sides of a tradeoff. Managers and finance people are balancing a tradeoff of delivery speed, cost, and quality to maximize business value. And the bureaucrats and lawyers are choosing more expensive and less reliable systems because they better manage the emotions of panicky anxious people looking for a scapegoat in a crisis. This has a cost.

Besides having bad luck in timing to be president when the stock market crashed, and therefore scapegoated for it, Herbert Hoover was well regarded in everything he did before and after his term, including many non engineering related things. So I think he is a particularly poor example of this. Public blame for things like that tends to be exactly as rational as thinking a hangover has nothing to do with last night.

I don't see how it's 'lawyerthink' at all; engineers also want to prevent bad outcomes, especially from their own work, as does everyone else.

Also, I think this ignores the rest of my point to nitpick one part of a complex system, which was part of a larger point.