Where I have seen digital models work well is in the initial planning phase, where you don't even know what you want to build yet. Iterating on abstract requir

Where I have seen digital models work well is in the initial planning phase, where you don't even know what you want to build yet. Iterating on abstract requirements in a simulation is faster than iterating on prototypes, but it can still get you (some) of the necessary intuition. Where it goes off the rails is when management drinks too much of the kool-aid, and gives all the R&D funding to the model-based-system-engineering experts. Then they start building models for every other domain without consulting those domain experts. (They're the experts on models so obviously those other folks will just slow things down, pointing out ways that theory and practice aren't quite the same.) Then it's all garbage-in, garbage-out. Turns out that the map is not the territory.