Hard drives were being designed this way a decade ago. It has generated some of the most reliable/durable designs in the industry. It produced good baseline designs that the engineers could then tweak into a production designs; the evolutionary designs were solid, but there were usually a few bits that were noticeably suboptimal in evaluation and which could be fixed without breaking the design if care was taken.
sounds similar to the "designs" produced through biological evolution. the knee, as an example.