No worries--it is very much a complex problem. I'm a mechanical engineer by training, a software engineer by profession, and I'm actually working in the medical

No worries--it is very much a complex problem. I'm a mechanical engineer by training, a software engineer by profession, and I'm actually working in the medical startup space. :) So, I absolutely appreciate that there are nuances to all of this, and I'm glad to see you thinking it over. I think some of the things we absolutely do wrong as an industry: -> lack of common nomenclature for problems (design patterns comes close, but then we look at all the buzzwording of other things, and argh) -> lack of language-standard test suites for things. There are more than five or six, for example, for JS, all of which scratch a slightly-different itch. This is absurd. -> lack of domain-standard test suites for things like numerics. We can't easily and reproducibly compare implementations across projects or languages for different problem domains. -> lack of standard engineering practices for team development and project management. Those are things that, I think, we could at least establish baselines for without jeopardizing our ability to deliver cool new shit on time.