That's the magic of it. When someone says "why should I have to pay X?" all the useful idiots can come out of the woodwork to spew things that aren't technically lies in abstract about how X is insulating against some failure mode that hasn't happened in 50yr and is probably cheaper to mop up every now and then to pay every time.
On one hand you've got "what we procure needs to work for earthly climates with some error bars so that we don't wind up with a million dollars of stuff that doesn't work in Alaska"
And on the other end of the spectrum you've got "my company makes .001% of widgets that do X but we make 50% of widgets that do X at -200deg F so we'll have our lobbyists wine and dine the brass until that number starts showing up in the technical standards forcing anyone who's submitting an RFP to use our product".
And of course the latter always tries to pretend like it's the former. It's not an easy problem. Sometimes concerns are valid. Sometimes they're bullshit. Usually the peddlers of bullshit believe their own bullshit.
Often people exposing fraud have incentive to ignore valid concerns.
The famous $600 hammer was a special non-sparking metal for use in an explosive environment. The famous expensive toilet seat was for use on the space shuttle (space station?). Both of these examples got a lot of press 30+ years ago, and it was years before the rest of the story got out.
I agree with your basic point, but, just to be pedantic:
I've read that the hammer was an accounting artifact (#1-3 below). In other words, someone decided not to piece out what each bit of a contract cost, they simply took the whole contract value, and divided by the number of items. So the hammer was expensive, but the custom designed engine was _cheap_.
The toilet seat was actually a panel of a plane that _included_ a toilet seat thing (technical terms here, #4 below). It evidently got press because "A Missouri toilet seat maker" thought that "toilet lavatory cover" meant "standard domestic toilet seat", and felt he could undercut Lockheed. When he got told no, he contacted his senator, and...
