I'm not sure you and the parent disagree much. "Engineerings excellence" might well describe a product that performs its function reliably with a minimum of in

I'm not sure you and the parent disagree much. "Engineerings excellence" might well describe a product that performs its function reliably with a minimum of intervention or fuss over a long period of time. When something "just works" like this, it's an achievement. "Engineering excellence" might also describe the "sheer will" combined with expertise and carefully chosen tradeoffs that makes something as unlikely and amazing as the SR-71 possible at all. The parent seemed to exclude it from excellence, perhaps on the grounds that it doesn't meet the criteria I describe in the previous paragraph, but it seems to me they're talking about the project with respect for what they were able to accomplish, and if so, this is essentially a semantic point about whether any engineering operation worthy of respect fits in the box of engineering excellence, rather than a question of whether the SR-71 was amazing.