Estimates rarely correlate with engineering capacity. Even so, they _are_ treated as commitments any time it’s politically convenient for someone to treat them

Estimates rarely correlate with engineering capacity. Even so, they _are_ treated as commitments any time it’s politically convenient for someone to treat them that way, regardless of how publicly you might have qualified your estimate as not a commitment. Also, with these types of estimates, they are basically misleading without some form of error bars, yet nobody ever incorporates that into it. Capacity is not some number, but a whole distribution of possible numbers, for which the mean might not be a relevant value (for example if it has several sharp modes that depend on discrete external events).