I think I phrased that badly. What I meant to convey is that a cheap and cheerful solution will need replacement at interval X, and a much more expensive soluti

I think I phrased that badly. What I meant to convey is that a cheap and cheerful solution will need replacement at interval X, and a much more expensive solution will need replacement at 1.2X. At least in my experience, the relationship between the money spent and reliability tended to be logarithmic. In other words, spending more on fancier equipment didn't really minimize the main pain point of failures: the ship being unavailable for sailing due to maintenance. It was worse in fact, because more expensive equipment wasn't more reliable usually. Shiny lcd touch panels looked great but were a ballache to use when there was a swell. I had chunky 800hp mercury engines fitted to crack that magical 100mph barrier, but because they were fly by wire, we had constant issues with electrical contacts that were difficult to diagnose out at sea (unlike the older mechanically actuated throttles). Even worse, the more "over-engineered" a piece of equipment becomes, the more difficult it tends to be to reason about it's boundary conditions. More moving parts, heavier weight, more exotic materials - these all add further unknowns to an already very chaotic system that is seafaring. To come back to my electronic vs simple mechanical throttle system, the former is difficult to repair with a set of pliers, the other is trivial. Even though the former may have redundancies and fancy recovery modes, if it does fail, you are SOL. So you are right, ultimately it's a cost question in the sense that if the more expensive components aren't more reliable, why spend money on them. I was keen to make the point that I'd have gladly spent more money on said equipment to make it more reliable, but there seemed to be no correlation between the two aspects :D