The two are not equivalent. A patent application is something a patent attorney will make hundreds of in a career. A bridge that can survive the big one is something a team of engineers would do a few times in their career (treating it as a unit). There are multiple orders of magnitude in difference between the two.

I can tell you from witnessed experience that a "car engineer" can custom design a house, do most of the code-related work himself, and pass all relevant inspections on the first try (with flying colors and compliments from the inspector), which seems much closer in scope.