The core topic in this subthread is focusing work on marketing the bandage instead of making it cheaper/save more lives, because marketing has much better ROI than actually providing value to people.
And the word can get out fine by itself, actually. The word of mouth is a pretty effective thing - and a lot of marketing is trying to game it, getting increased profits by destroying its usefulness.
1) Person A makes a crappy bandage (Y units of quality) with X units of budget and markets with 9X units of budget
2) Person B makes a decent bandage (5Y units of quality) with 5X units of budget.
If person B were to also market the bandage with 5X units of budget, they will take a larger fraction of person A's market share than if they don't, thus providing more value to people. Yes you can argue that if person A didn't exist, then they wouldn't need to spend this money and the bandage could be cheaper, but this is clearly an example where adding marginal marketing can be a net benefit to society.
> And the word can get out fine by itself, actually.
Umm, good luck with that. There are only a few, small, specialized businesses for which that is true.
Engineering tradeoffs are very much about costs. I could (well once upon a time I could :-) design a bridge that's stable up to a (not very) nearby atomic blast; more stable than the bedrock it's built on. But that would require an unnecessary level of resources (unless atomic resistance is in fact a design requirement). I could design the most super-awesome web site that scales to 40 billion unique visitors...but it's unlikely to be needed (though if some of the uniques are robotic, perhaps it is). Simply choosing an alloy that's simpler to work with the tools on hand is a rescue tradeoff, and those resources are time and money.
Likewise, the plane (I assume you mean airplane) has only one valuable purpose (transport people or goods that someone wants transported) and that is denominated in money. Make it cheaper and more people can fly, or pay less for their gadgets or fresh shellfish.
It's incredibly naive to to say that marketing is some zero-sum game. If you have an amazing bandage that is cheap and saves lives you still have to get the word out.