But when you build a skyscraper you don’t one shot a completed building that stays static its entire life - you build a set of empty floors that someone else designs & fits out, sometimes years after the building as a whole is commissioned, usually several times in the lifespan of the superstructure.

And in the fitting out there often are things that exist only to get customer feedback (of sales), such as model apartments, sample cubicle layouts etc.

So yes, you are right that engineering can guide us to building something right first time - the hard part from software perspective is usually building the right thing, no the thing right.

An interesting analogy I came across once but could never find again is that with software systems, we’re not building a building, we’re designing a factory that produces an output - the example was a mattress factory that took in raw rubber feedstock & cloth and produced mattresses.