I think some of the responses are missing the larger point here. Every new tech has unknowns and potential issues, some of which don't come to light for years.

I think some of the responses are missing the larger point here. Every new tech has unknowns and potential issues, some of which don't come to light for years. If it takes 20+ years to go from initial small-scale uses to volume production on big projects (e.g. Airbus), then sometime during those years many of the issues will come to light. It's pretty clear that technology is accelerating (and has been for a long time). What is not as clear is that our ability to artificially age products, in order to test how they will stand up over time, has always only been part of the way in which problems were found. Another, perhaps more important, and certainly more authoritative way, is to look at how they actually hold up over time. If technology takes long enough to go from small-scale uses to volume production, that's good enough. At some point, and perhaps we've reached it, the pace of technological change is fast enough that we end up relying almost entirely on testing methods that try to simulate long-term aging in a short amount of time. These methods won't always do the job. Notably, none of these issues are unique to aerospace.