"A designer knows he has reached perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) -Robert A. Heinlein
Here's a good one from my current boss: "As engineers, we don't make stuff. We make the documentation used to make stuff." This is especially impactful because I work at a small company where we engineers assemble, modify, and test our stuff. For really simple things, we'll break out the basic tools and fabricate them ourselves. The point is that your design can be lovely, and elegant, effective and cost-effective. But if your drawings (for example) are no good, you're not doing your damn job. We're not going to be building production parts ourselves, so our final output is the documentation.
As a strong advocate for Design For Manufacturing, I would have to say, the better the design, the less need there is for drawings. . . think mistake proof assembly. As for my favourite quote: "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got" Henry Ford
I like the Ford quote, but as to your first point, if you don't have drawings, how's anyone to know what your 'better' design is? You can't have mistake proof assembly without something to assemble.
