[turretslug]

Entertainingly curious, and more into the realms of psychology than electronics. Perhaps someone with a detached, academically-inclined mindset and a tendency to over-focus? If someone had a "physics lesson" appreciation of components such as capacitors without the coal-face understanding of their failure modes, it might not have entered their head that it could be leaky or otherwise prone to failure.

"The output valve is overheating due to excess HT current draw, therefore the negative auto-bias needs to be increased. End of problem."

The components used to effect the wrong solution are overly expensive and over-rated, again suggesting a detached outlook. I've seen the academic/practical conflict in work situations- someone with a string of qualifications will come up with convoluted, fanciful and ultimately misguided reasons for a fault, someone with hardly an exam pass in their life but decades in the trade will say, "Picture shimmy?- change D2437, it's always D2437." The optimum state is somewhere in-between.