I'm not convinced that challenge shows what you say it shows. If someone set me a challenge to "modify this structure to support a brick" and the solution was "

I'm not convinced that challenge shows what you say it shows. If someone set me a challenge to "modify this structure to support a brick" and the solution was "take the structure away and put the brick on the ground" I would feel like it was a stupid trick. "Remove the spire and put the brick lower" is less clear, but it's along those lines; "make this church and tower reliably support a clock at the top where everyone can see it", solution: "take the tower away and put the clock on the church roof", no, it's a Captain Kirk Kobayashi-Maru cheat where the solution to the "engineering challenge" is to meta-change-the-goal. Yes you might get to change the goal in business software development, but you also know that the goal is 'working solutions' not 'build up this existing structure to do X'.