I definitely see where you are coming from re: 'engineering' logic. As I said before, I don't have a huge argument against this. However, for me this is where the metaphor blurs into near-meaninglessness for me. Optimization happens to be a specialization of mine, and I can't find a reason to think of it as engineering, except for the fact that I take measurements. The optimization itself is more like applied information theory. I can agree that the measurement + iteration is perhaps engineering.