Governments, like societies in general, are just aggregations of human beings. No facade of legalisms can ever fully overcome that fundamental truism.

I've always thought of it as an attempt to engineer peer-pressure. Build institutions that recruit like-minded people in the hopes that when faced with tremendous pressure, the group can force individuals to fall in line around a predetermined principle.

What they didn’t foresee is that some people are immune to peer pressure because their goal is to inflict harm.

My take is a bit different to yours. I think they didn't anticipate a concerted effort to undermine like-mindedness of the people comprising institutions in an attempt to make an egalitarian society. It's not that long ago that people appreciated the difference between social exclusion and custodianship, and recognized that some amount of gatekeeping is essential to institutional function.

To be clear, that same gatekeeping can be and has a times been perverted into social exclusion, but the problem at hand IMO is the discarding of the baby with the bathwater.

I think the fancy way of saying this is that it attempts to solve "coordination problems".