I found those to be particularly revealing since this was an aircraft built for combat.
Remember, there's a big difference between "built for combat" and "built to last."
Built for combat doesn't necessarily mean built to last, or with the best specifications of the materials used, etc. The Army Air Corps, for example, stopped ordering primer on the interiors of B-17s going to Europe because losses were so appallingly bad, corrosion would be the
least of the aircraft's worries. They built thousands of Liberty ships that were not outstanding in their own right, but they didn't have to be - if they made it back and forth across the Atlantic just once, that was considered enough. "Jeep" carriers were constructed on merchant ship hulls because it was good enough to work, and in wartime, good enough may be the best you can get if you also want a
lot of something.
So while combat aircraft of that era, and combat ships and tanks and everything else, were well engineered (something American has always been very good at), no one can make the case that they were over-engineered.
LTM, who sometimes yearns for yesteryear,
Monty Fowler, TIGHAR No. 2189 ECSP.