The ancient lore of Systems Engineering
Once upon the time the giants walked the Earth. They built spacecrafts, aircraft, big ships, submarines, air defense systems. The gold was not a problem - any time when the Russian Bear growled in the woods, the Wise Councils opened their purse.
And then the Russian Bear have thrown the towel and the gold spring has gone dry. Meanwhile mean Gnomes have overcome the world with their fancy software gadgets, and Dragons took over the commodities market. And then the Internet came - the wild beast that nobody could tame but everybody could ride.
And the giants retreated into there cave called NCOSE and then INCOSE. Meanwhile their legacy was forgotten and replaced by endless scrolls of SE standards and procedures.
Many young knights, peasants and serfs tried to seek their wisdom but they could not understand the language the giants spoke, so they invented many languages of their own and the story of Babel tower repeated once once again. Still, the giants laid silently in their cave speaking only once in a while and their voice has grown feebler and feebler until nothing was heard anymore.
I hope that I overreacted in the sadness of the fable - but this is the impression young SEs have of the SEs of old - there is a lot of wisdom but spoken in the obscure language.
Am I right or am I wrong or may be I just dreaming?
Scientist behind Software for Mod, Sim and Vis using Converged HPC / AI
10ySeems that there can be an over-reliance on standards, especially when the standards exhibit incompleteness and inconsistency. We see this, for example, in reaction to ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 Software Testing Standards. IMO, when the formal foundations for standards is weak - meaning non-scientific - then the whole house of cards may come tumbling down. This may end up being the moral to your story.