What industry is this in? What sort of customers are they?
Ok, so to get all serious again on this thread (and it's a good thread!), are you really saying that these pictures (the precarious-looking stack tied with an elastic band and the protoboard that looks like it was soldered by a cat) are shipping production products? If so, were they one-offs for a particular customer? (The production rate can't be very high here, and I shudder to think of the failure rate...)
The attached shows cutting edge EE work by a US aircraft engineering company. This is a product in the field (not the lab) and covered by US airworthiness certification.
Nuff said.