Bingo.
That and today’s engineer is either making the next social media god send or wasting time with some green save sewage for consumption process.
A big part of the problem in development is the USG oversight. How could that be such a problem?
1 deep offices where an individual who is a gatekeeper of sorts can hold up an entire process or program simply because they called in sick.
An apathetic attitude towards schedule because they don’t pay or get hauled before Congress to explain overruns or delays.
Requirements creep, where the services find some new widget or capability and insist it get added into the already finalized design...requires a redesign, re-analysis and time to retool and manufacture. Not to mention the weight gains of most additions that are the bane of aviation.
Mircromanagement from the USG insisting to have just about every item of minutiae approved by the USG instead of granting the contractor latitude in implementing the tasks.
The F117 went from contract approval in 1979 to first flight in 1981 to IOC in 1983...it can be done with other programs but the USG insists on getting its cut, at the contractors expense.
This is not counting of course the complexity of advanced sensors, systems, and fusion integration that the services are requiring as basically baseline capability.