“engineers stick to doing things that are well understood and predictable”

I’m calling BS on this. If this were true, we’d still be a ground species. Engineering has been and will always be about creating something electrical, mechanical, computerized, or all, that solves a problem. Understood or not. Engineers are not oracles. They can not predict whether a tower built in Italy will eventually begin to lean due to erosion. They can not predict that a steel beam rated for 300T of force would break at 180T. They can not predict a rogue developer removing a package from underneath their dependency tree.

You can give estimates all you want but you are still guessing.

If engineers were as you say they are, we would never have delays, we would never have traffic jams, we would never have crap software, we would never have flight.