You write "wherever possible", but: Have you ever seen the beancounting itself having been under scrutiny?
I'd wager a big part of it is also the same politics based asymmetry that's visible everywhere; like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or people only get credit for managing a crisis, not preventing it in the first place.
If I can add to that: A precursor to both of those would be the precision lathe, from which eventually two of the most crucial prerequisites for the industrialization stem: The ability to a) produce machine parts with a high degree of precision catered for their purpose and/or context, and b) the ability to develop widely established norms these parts can adhere to (or, if you will, by which they could be judged).
The steam engine wouldn't have had its impact without the possibility for e.g. precision engineered pistons, and any industrialization would have been severely impaired without the possibilities that the distributed production of exchangeable parts (even as simple as screws, nuts and bolts) to established norms came with.
Came here to comment on Gothic, too. I'd have picked the original Gothic even more as an example, though -- there, you are in a prisoner colony, even if you are in a settlement. Anger the wrong people and you won't survive the experience for most of the game.
Also the swamp camp is really close to some rather deadly creatures if you're not careful in the early game.
Even worse, some people seemingly aren't even able to produce a question.
"I tried to $ACTION and $FUNCTION throws an error." Followed by awkward silence (or the written equivalent in chat rooms).
Great, why are you telling you me/us about it? What do you expect from me/us? If you're not even willing to produce some text with a question mark at the end, why should anyone bother to invest their time in helping you out?
It might not be the OS, but just statistical inevitability. If you're talking about CPU utilization on Linux, for example, it's not all that unlikely that the number you're staring at isn't "time spent by CPU doing things" but "average CPU run queue length". "100%" then doesn't only mean the CPU gets no rest, but "there's always someone waiting for a CPU to become free". It likely pays off to understand where the load numbers in your tooling actually come from.
Even if that weren't the case, lead times for tasks will always increase with more utilization; see e.g. [1]: If you push a system from 80% to 95% utilization, you have to expect a ~4.75x increase in lead time for each task _on average_: (0.95/0.05) / (0.8/0.2)
Note that all except the term containing ρ in the formula are defined by your system/software/clientele, so you can drop them for a purely relative comparison.
Edit: Or, to try to picture the issue more intuitively: If you're on a highway nearing 100% utilization, you're likely standing in a traffic jam. And if that's not (yet) strictly the case, the probabilty of a small hiccup creating one increases exponentially.
And frighteningly good at guessing what I'm throwing at it. Makes a good reverse guessing game: Find something it doesn't get right.
My only success so far:
A cleaner is hopelessly out of his element when his victim wakes up.
(La Femme Nikita)
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