I have to agree. FWIW, I spotted a trend between that behavior and employers. Bureaucrats, such as government inspectors, were the ones usually mystified by the real world; unable to do anything beyond throwing and parts or components at the problem until it was fixed. The ones that would dig and dig until they found out what was changing expected behavior usually turned out to be on performance pay - that is, either meet a standard or don't get any money. More often than not, that's be a contractor QC type that was being paid my me, not some obscure finance or contracting office in the sky.
My all time favorite was an HVAC guy who showed us how to reroute our under-floor cable trays so his Air Conditioners could keep our frames within operating temp. Even with a 36" floor, and 4 multi-ton units, we were constantly shutting down for overtemp. He found the problem after a morning of testing, including smoke testing with some fancy doohickey that recorded airflow in real time. Took us the rest of the week to move most of the trays, but it worked the first time. Turned out most of the airflow was just going around the intake vents in the frames. He did tell us he knew that almost as soon as he got there, since the first thing he did was put a hand on an exhaust vent, which of course had almost no air coming out. The rest of the time he was trying to find out where the heck the air was going, and what had to be done to get it to the intakes.