> The manufacturers, having no knowledge of the existence, let alone importance, of these elements, were in the dark about how they might rectify the situation.

This is an interesting story for anyone who may find themselves in a present or recent state of success at any endeavor, given that any sufficiently complex endeavor probably includes inputs that you don't fully understand or may be entirely unaware of.

Probably goes double at the organizational level; brains tend to be distributed roughly about 1 per person and institutional knowledge with it, absent substantial effort to spread it around. But even that hits its limits: there are almost certainly things that no one knows why they're working and could change or stop.