A blind, intuition-only team might burn 10 units of wasted exploration before finding the path. Solid engineering — closing the collect↔eval loop, making every round produce reusable conclusions, letting know-how actually accumulate — compresses that 10 down to 3, even 2. That is real value. But you can't compress it to 1: the last stretch, the data→model map, has no analytic solution under today's science — it can only be measured. You can make measurement fast, cheap, and disciplined; you cannot make the act of measuring disappear. That method, pushed to the physical limit, is the wind tunnel.