Bad choice of words. I meant to imply that someone in upper management made this a requirement, and then it was up to the engineers to figure out how to accompl

Bad choice of words. I meant to imply that someone in upper management made this a requirement, and then it was up to the engineers to figure out how to accomplish that, contrasting it to a view that this was a pure engineering failure. If this were completely an engineering consideration, I'm sure they would have come up with a different solution. The (artificial) political constraint is what led to this particular design.