For example, to plug in a laptop and do a checksum of the binaries would take seconds. This would only test that the software was a known set of instructions,

For example, to plug in a laptop and do a checksum of the binaries would take seconds. This would only test that the software was a known set of instructions, it wouldn't help debug the flow of the code and the run-time state: Software and the state and sequence of events are much harder to look at and conclusively say "yes, this was the culprit". Disassembling an engine would seem to be on the same order of complexity as disassembling and reverse engineering firmware without source code (perhaps more so).