This method has already been proven to be infinitely better than the old school approach. Falcon is the most reliable rocket in the world and capable of landing its booster back safely to earth, something which thought impossible by basically everyone in the industry. It took years of physical iteration to iron out all the problems though, see this video from SpaceX of all their years of failed attempts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
Anyone who has ever built a physical product will tell you that theory and good engineering are important, but once you start to actually build something you enter "integration hell", which means you need to physically exercise your product end-to-end many MANY times, and iron out all of the edge cases that reality presents.
It has nothing to do with "better engineering" and everything to do with complex systems interacting with physical reality.
Stuff Made Here (YouTuber) made a video where he built a disc launcher, which is a great example of what the process is like. He put quite a lot of engineering and design work into the project, but eventually entered integration hell at some point and just had to iterate and problem solve by repeatedly firing test disks until all the kinks were worked out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9rClZrbnrQ
Anyone who has ever built a physical product will tell you that theory and good engineering are important, but once you start to actually build something you enter "integration hell", which means you need to physically exercise your product end-to-end many MANY times, and iron out all of the edge cases that reality presents.
It has nothing to do with "better engineering" and everything to do with complex systems interacting with physical reality.
Stuff Made Here (YouTuber) made a video where he built a disc launcher, which is a great example of what the process is like. He put quite a lot of engineering and design work into the project, but eventually entered integration hell at some point and just had to iterate and problem solve by repeatedly firing test disks until all the kinks were worked out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9rClZrbnrQ