RCA is a tool. It can be everything the article says it is. It can also be incredibly useful by not being what the article says it has to be. For instance I'

RCA is a tool. It can be everything the article says it is. It can also be incredibly useful by not being what the article says it has to be. For instance I've heard there's at the very least an FAA institutional push against plane crash RCAs simply saying "pilot error". Pilots are known to make errors (we all do), so the FAA wants to know how the error wasn't accounted for in the greater process and resulted in a plane falling out of the sky. If you use RCA not for blame, or don't call it quits after finding a "smoking gun", it's a fantastic tool for enumerating single points of failure that you can prove actually failed. There's normally multiple things you can do better if multiple people care about what comes out of an RCA.