[DonRotolo]

The real technical achievement hasn't been mentioned here yet.

The 787 was designed and developed in software, with almost no models being built before Job 1 started.

Read that again. Then think about this: It's not all that crazy to completely design your robot in Inventor, fabricate the individual pieces from plans, and assemble a functioning mechanism with no prototypes. No physical ones, at least: All prototypes are in software.

That's how the real world does it.

I see teams build a robot and the CAD kids go up to it with rulers, measuring what's been built so they can put it into CAD. That's backwards, of course. CAD is for what is going to be, not for what already exists.