No, it's actually more expensive because you don't get anything done. Precision equipment either works or it doesn't.

Commercial software development practices might be relevant where you can fix things overnight, but this is hard science instrumentation made of atoms, you ship things that must work as expected because the whole point of all this is making better measurements as the field evolves and there's a scientific case for doing it. It is not about selling production versions of the experiment to potential customers.

Then we need to design precision equipment differently. More redundant parts. More wiggle room. More fuzz testing. Find out where precision actually matters, and not just overbuild everything. And iterate more.