This reminds me of the story of Muntz TVs. Mr. Muntz was a self-taught engineer who made a company that produced TVs at significantly lower prices than everyone else, and there's stories of how he'd work with his engineers and just randomly remove parts he didn't think were necessary, to cut costs. Many times, it worked, so the production design adopted these changes.

The problem was, while these minimalist-component TVs seemed to work OK in the lab, or in most customers' homes, they didn't work very well in edge cases (like people in locations with poorer signal strength).