Some of it is that "legacy" products often involve more difficult engineering than people think. Circa 1980 this bus design was a notorious failure in NYC:
It is amusing/depressing to consider this as getting punished for having expensive engineering to avoid failures. If you do put in more engineering to get a more robust solution, you wind up not hitting the expensive failures and people start to assume you just spent more money in engineering than you needed to.
Coincidentally, it was just a couple weeks ago that a (non-technical, relatively younger) family member made a point me that Y2K was completely overblown.
I mean, it was. It was also a genuinely big problem, but given the scope for hype, even massive problems can be overblown as well.
(And the media is pretty good at it. I'm pretty sure if a comet was about to hit the planet tomorrow and wipe out humanity there would still be an article that somehow manages to make it sound worse)
It worked back then because labor was expensive, because unions were waning, but still strong in the 80's. If labor is expensive, you make sure to do it right once.
Nowadays with spending power way down, it may in fact be more "efficient" to get something out quick, and have frequent repairs. If you hit the expensive failure... welp, just throw it out and make a new one.
I'm not sure that is the reason, honestly. Used to, the government could spend a TON of money with relatively little resistance. Even programs that did get a lot of resistance could still be done without worrying about the political capital of fighting people that were largely on your side.
At the federal level, this was somewhat easy to do, because the vast majority of government spending would go to domestic recipients. Yes, we were spending a lot, but local places would see and could celebrate in the results.
At some point, though, we switched to the idea that taxation is punitive. And we stopped taking pride in big things the government can do. Quite the contrary, people are still convinced the F22 is bad. Meanwhile, many of us still revere the SR-71 as a beautiful thing. (Which, I mean, it is.)
