If you’ll allow me another analogy, I think back to the seventies and eighties when I found myself in the world of business. Without any formal training and very little guidance, I had to invent my own way of doing things. I had studied physics at university so I naturally fell into using numbers and accounting to control and shape the organisation. I looked for mathematical relationships in the figures as if I was doing physical science.
This approach was successful up to a point, but the real world is irreducible, messy and unpredictable. Organisations have both a hard and a soft side. Numbers and accounting aren’t a panacea. You have to leave room for the individuality, intuitiveness and creativity of people. To give their best they need a degree of autonomy and freedom so that the organisation can respond to complexity.
Similarly in hifi, the quantitative engineering approach is the essential foundation on which everything is built, Yet it is not the whole story because there is a need for qualitative thinking to get the complete picture. There has to be a balance between control and freedom or the scientific and the artistic.