I don't believe I'm missing the point of the article, I'm fundamentally disagreeing with it. You say "In engineering problems, tradeoffs are known and in human

I don't believe I'm missing the point of the article, I'm fundamentally disagreeing with it. You say "In engineering problems, tradeoffs are known and in human systems, tradeoffs aren't known.". I believe this is more false than true on both counts. I don't believe my second point is the one you make in the article. I'm saying that frequently policies are not the best known means to achieve the stated objectives of the policies. The problem there is not that people can't agree on the problem they are trying to solve (though that is frequently a problem, both in politics and engineering) but that the policy solutions are known to not be good ways to achieve the stated goals and that in part that is due to the real goals being different.