The shoddy "engineering" that you're used to in the business world is not actually proper engineering; it never was.

Consider cryptocurrencies and smart contracts -- they work perfectly fine with millions of transactions daily, all executed by perfectly correct code -- that's real engineering. Mature programming languages also are good examples of real engineering.

Of course everything needs updates to account for edge cases, but tackling these correctly only makes the engineering more sound, not less sound.

In the real world, the selective application of law commonly is more likely to take away rights than to grant rights.