Im not sure that RD works that way. Innovate, time and compatibility, pick two.
And it's a mistake to think in all-or-nothing thinking here. I didn't say you needed to design a rock-solid integration system, only that it looked like integration was a minimal concern -- and that was an interesting choice.
I come from the tech community. The longer we put off integration, the more expensive things become.
We know for a fact that no matter what they pentagon does with wheels, they need to fit on a body and cost less than a million bucks or so. Even giving the R&D teams wide latitude for they're playing around in, we can start setting some reasonable guardrails up.