This sort of thinking precludes the possibility of ever developing better methods though. And this statistical argument was actually quite common in machine des

This sort of thinking precludes the possibility of ever developing better methods though. And this statistical argument was actually quite common in machine design until people started actually building machines that were more precise than many believed possible. The thesis I linked has examples of arguments analogous to what you're saying for why precision machine design is impossible. Edit: I don't mean to be too harsh, you could be right, but software engineering is a young discipline. Mechanical engineering is much older and it was only recently that precision machine design became possible (and, just as importantly, teachable). I believe software engineering has the potential for a similar change in how it is done, at least for projects that warrant it.