In large engineering organizations, it is not uncommon for highly specialized engineers to not be aware of the status of the overall project. Plus, you hear A LOT of different stories, rumors and expectations as projects progress. I'm SURE they started with "Oh Yeah! This Baby is Going into ORBIT!" but as time went on they were like "Well.. we don't have time to build these 18 components to spec, so we loosened the tolerance so we think it'll launch but might explode 10 seconds later." And the nameless drone in sector 47 only heard the first projection.

I would be very surprised if Shotwell didn't have an all-hands to set the whole team's expectations beforehand.