I did not work in shipping, but I did work in manufacturing for 15 years, mostly with a focus on test engineering & automation, but also getting into warehouse/

I did not work in shipping, but I did work in manufacturing for 15 years, mostly with a focus on test engineering & automation, but also getting into warehouse/material management and shipping/logistics. My masters is in operations research for manufacturing. I agree with you that objective optimization is largely academic. There are always reasons why it's impossible or impractical to adhere to the most efficient versions of standardized processes. Sometimes these are "stupid" (people) reasons, and frequently they're reasonable justifications that accommodate for any number of externalities (weather, downtime, supply chain disruptions, lumpiness in demand signals and forecasts based on seasonality, etc). That said, it's almost always smart to start with the most efficient version of a process and then add exception-handling, rather than to create a standardized process based on known exceptions. If you let exceptions become the rule, you'll always be operating less efficiently than optimal.