The stuff "real" engineers do is at the limits of what is possible for human beings as a species to do - go higher, go faster, go deeper, be stronger, last longer. That's what he means by "never been done before". He means "wasn't physically possible for anyone on the planet yesterday". Is that not magical?

And if it goes wrong, it really goes wrong, as the Deep Horizon leak illustrates. If your "novel" RoR application doesn't work, no-one cares, you tweak a line of code and try again. Big deal.