Not Mid-Atlantic, but I've heard that one way to acquire a "standard" Mid-Western US accent is to speak along with a trained speaker, such as a particular newscaster. And "You are supposed to stop before sounding just like that person."
Perhaps to highlight efforts in some threads here, I'm reading The Managed Heart by Arlie Hochschild. Besides considering emotional work, she speaks of feeling rules. The latter provides a term for rules of engagement, so to speak, we bring to incidental, causal and serious interactions. Based upon the view that emotions are socially-resolved, not merely interally-resolved, we never escape either emotional work or related rules of engagement.
Just a thought, incentive-wise. Could part of the motivation for automakers to use touch-screens involve regulatory risk? It is one challenge to freeze requirements within a companies own process well enough in advance. It is a risk to have those requirements changed from outside. And what if regulators start to assume touchscreens and lower cost of implementation.
In the late 1970's I attended an informational talk by an engineer in the Bell system. The speaker said: "We don't know how good the [POTS] system is, but we don't want to make it any worse."
In driver's ed we were taught to put our right hand behind the passenger seat whenever looking back to go in reverse. As if to reinforce the modal/perspective change.
Yea, lack of mechanism at play as well, I'd guess. I know Elon has spoken about not letting requirements get crazy, but there must be some safety-related UX requirements to check against.
Why not rotate their assignments as a matter of policy. They might do a deep dive and fix something no one bothers to fix on a similar assignment. But then it is due dilligence to have another look at their work. I know this sounds theoretical compared to practice, but it seems to be on the level of separating conceptual or design breakthoughs from production-izing code.