I don't think that a strategy designed for a specific engineering problem is likely to succeed on a huge scientific problem. In fact, if you prematurely treat

I don't think that a strategy designed for a specific engineering problem is likely to succeed on a huge scientific problem. In fact, if you prematurely treat a scientific challenge as an engineering one, you'll generally just end up wasting your money, with little incremental progress or positive side effects. Has top-down science ever worked? (For example, you can throw away a huge amount of money developing chemotherapy regimes by just screening tons of random chemicals and running large trials. But the amount of progress you'll make will be trivial compared to what you could do by spending the same money on understanding the mechanisms of specific cancers.)