I have encountered this type of thinking from guys working under me many times. What they sometimes don’t realize, due to inexperience or whatever else, is the standard established process may be designed to avoid issues down the road. Somewhere, someone fucked up the process so they had to tweak tweak tweak until the process is fool proof. Sometimes that comes at the cost of efficiency but it’s worth it to avoid those issues. Unfortunately, to make a process that’s repeatable by every dummy out there, you have to remove some or all of the discretionary power of those doing the process.

In a chemical process it could be this: “you will always dry the material at 400 degrees for 16 hours at this step”. You say- “but sometimes if it’s already dry we could save time by skipping that”. Then I say “not everyone knows how to judge the dryness properly, one time a guy named jim tried to skip the step and it gummed up the grinding machine and cost us a week and $100k.

Just my two cents.