I was going to write a similar comment. The CAD part of mechanical engineering is usually a really small part of the overall process. Furthermore, there are rea

I was going to write a similar comment. The CAD part of mechanical engineering is usually a really small part of the overall process. Furthermore, there are really good tools in existing CAD to act as "pointers", they just aren't necessarily how a computer scientist would invent them. They are usually called configurations and indeed they can be automated. Normally "32 instances of a part" would not need to be manually updated either, one update would do it. Finally, it's naive to think simulation is analogous to CI. In some cases it can be pretty close to automated, but normally there is a lot of expertise and interpretation required to get useful results and there are a lot of steps between or instead of simply inputting geometry to the simulation program. It's true that interoperability and version control should be improved, but configuration control is more important and engineers like the author are the ones that try to parameterize too much and cause hidden mistakes and extra work for everyone else.