"Simply put, Poulter didn’t know better because no one knew better." I highly doubt that. Also full winter climes for testing were readily available just hours north.
I guess it's the waterfall method in extreme.
That’s a good (and fairly accurate) observation.
I suspect a lot of the reason for not going north, was for publicity. It sounds like a great deal of hucksterism was involved. Maybe going to Canada would not have generated enough press.
The budget for development was absurdly low, even adjusted for today’s dollars. I suspect funding was always foremost in their minds.
"We don't have the budget to test it!"
I guess hope _is_ a strategy!
The intended goal was enabling lots of safe travel through the Antarctic, something they failed at. In modern dollars they paid $50k per mile of successful trip. They could have spent way less money to achieve that goal with other approaches. Heck, they probably could have just turned the money into $1 bills and burned it to keep the explorer warm for such a short trip.
So they could at least have learned something. But if you're right and Antarctica was the closest place to test it, then they should have planned for that. Expecting something novel to work the first time it's tried isn't a plan. It isn't a strategy. It's just a fantasy.