To your larger point I don't think engineering logic is necessarily superior to financial logic, or manager logic. The problem is that because of the way we have built our society, engineering (and all other fields) must comply with and be subservient to bureaucrat and lawyer logic. The legal defense against an engineering failure is not to prove that your overall failure rate is low and within acceptable limits, but rather to come up with as long a list as possible of safety measures and policies that you followed without any regard to whether they actually have any effect at all.