[justapassenger]

It's part dysfunction for sure, but it's mostly just reality being messy. Anyone who worked on a bigger engineering problem, solving real business problem, learns very quickly that reality is messy and doesn't conform to rules. And that's usually main challenge of building any project.

And it's problem specific to software engineering. Any engineering deals with it - when you manufacture physical things, for example, tolerances, safety factors, etc, are all tools to deal with reality being messy.