It absolutely is. You’re designing a complex and highly coupled system within a framework of rules and constraints. In the case of regulation, the rules and constraints come from economics, while in the case of operating systems they come from computer science. In both situations, there are no known optimal solutions—nobody has designed a mathematically optimal way regulate electricity prices, much less structure an electricity market, just like nobody has designed a mathematically optimal way to manage memory, much less structure a kernel. Thus, a lot of judgment and heuristics and trade offs are involved at every level, and the exercise of that judgment is going to depend heavily on personal philosophies. Margaret Thatcher approaches regulation very differently than Franklin Roosevelt, just as Linus Torvalds approaches operating system kernels very differently than Andrew Tanenbaum. If you hire Tanenbaum versus Torvalds to design you an OS kernel, you can expect a very different result, based on their expert judgment.

Unfortunately, a lot of people think of regulation as just picking from a menu of policy choices, and fail to realize that what you’re really doing is designing economic systems and markets.