It absolutely was designed. Thoughtfully and explicitly.
You might find it interesting to learn about how the new testament was assembled. Many books did not make it into the final version of the new testament, left on the cutting room floor of history. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew for instance has a teenage Jesus fighting dragons. Check out the New Testament Apocrypha. [1]
Any scholar of the NT knows that the apochrypha date very late and the cannon is the legitimately oldest extant texts. There is no evidence that earlier texts were excluded. You do know (you probably don't) that the majority of the Pauline epistles are considered to be authentic, by secular atheist scholars, and date to to the middle of the first century right?
Outside of the pauline works, Hebrews is dated to no later than about 45 AD by secular, non believing scholars.
You're advacing a rather tired late 19th century view that just doesn't wash in the light of modern scholarship but was the darling of many 1800s and early 1900s lutherans.
The point I'm making is that the new testament was curated and texts were picked and chosen to advance the interests of those picking and choosing.
Ancient Jews saw the scriptures as possessing different levels of “cannonicity” - the Books of Moses were “very cannon” while books like Maccabees were “new fangled.”
Christians adopted that view as well. The fights over the Old Testament are still ongoing with different religions organically accepting or rejecting other books every now and then.
The logic behind these still ongoing arguments has much to do with traditions, and little with the actual content.
If we were to reevaluate the Old Testament with fresh eyes, I don’t think anyone would include Ecclesiastes or Job. Too depressing and bizarre.
Not even clear what’s going on or when it’s taking place.
But ultimately there’s a certain logic to these debates - and “we’re designing a religion” isn’t part of it.
Edit: Here’s an excellent example of how “non-designed” the Old Testament is: https://orthodoxwiki.org/Old_Testament_Canon
"Canon" is what's considered truth in a mythos (also a musical form and an electronics company).
"Cannon" is a type of gun.
Throughout history societies have used religion as a way to do this. Every society usually had one official religion that was used in this way: ancient egyptians, ancient greece, roman empire (first a religion copied from greece, later replaced by christianity, where the center of christianity was actually moved to rome), european kingsdoms with different versions of their official christian religions, and other countries throughout the world.
It's a pretty simple mechanism: follow our rules, god sees everything, if you don't follow the rules you will be punished, i.e., go to hell, if you follow the rules you will be rewarded, i.e., go to heaven.
We do the same thing with children in the hope that they'll listen to their parents: if you are a good boy/girl you get presents from sinterklaas (santaclause), if you are bad you will be be punished. Dutch santaclaus will take the bad children to spain, which is our version of hell ;-)
Funny thing is that children around the age of 8 will be smart enough to understand that they've been lied to and that santaclaus doesn't exist, whereas with religion some adults never get to this point of enlightenment.
Sure, some people (especially historically) have treated it like a tool, but that is not religion's fault (religion can't be at fault because it lacks agency). Those people would have seized upon whatever cultural phenomenon that was available to their own political purposes.