Even if they were, and/or are surrounded by advisors with science credentials, the overwhelming political pressure coming from corporate lobbyists will likely mean science will be ignored.
It was a political concensus. And that political concensus is still strong today. Our (Australian) politics are infested with it. It is like another reality with them.
"...The man (the authors seem to know it was a man, at least) who wrote the software for this machine did so alone, without documenting what he was doing. The company then sort of vaguely tested it."
Lone wolf programmer, no docs, vague testing. What kind of manager(s) would let this out the door knowing this? Never mind the lone wolf programmer. Find the managers and beat them with sticks
Outlier? Well that depends on a lot of things - social class, colour, gender, religion, position on the environment etc. What looks like an outlier to you may not be an outlier to lots of other people.
I hated you at first for modifying the core libraries to break standard fuctionality, writing 500-line SQL statements full of string concatenations and using mutable globals all over the place, but now I see your point. Thanks, I have been earning an above average salary fixing your bugs and I will have a job for life. Still, fuck you man.
Maybe a mention of using https://validator.w3.org/ would also be helpful to check that all the html is correct and complete.