...Similarly, the LM ascent stage was always slightly off balance. If you watch the 16 mm footage, the LM wallowed constantly in one direction and had to be corrected. This was deemed acceptable since the corrective control action wasn't very significant. But it's one of those things that could have been corrected by a design change, but wasn't. The existing design was "good enough." Hence being successful as an engineer means (among other things) realizing when Better is the enemy of Good, and emotionally letting go of the ghosts in existing designs. Every successful design will still harbor "We never fixed that" issues. And every engineer accumulates a list of, "If we had it to do over again..."
The Murray and Cox book "Apollo The Race to the Moon" describes Joe Shea constantly emphasising that point, mentioning the use of Passive Thermal Control to manage the effect of extreme low temperatures on the heat shield material, and the lack of a fuel gauge for the SPS engine.
But presumably this sort of mindset is going to be fairly common in a wide range of workplaces?
Over the years I worked in many places where people could see better ways of doing things, but we were told to keep doing things the way they were because "the system works well enough", and "we don't have the money to fix that". Then, if the money became available, perhaps some random selection of those improvements might be actually programmed (can you sense my cynical nostalgia?).
