Thank you, anon, that is very helpful. Maybe with another two cups of coffee this morning I might have seen it, but your explanation is gold.

Funny thing, many years ago I worked for a large, LARGE engineering corporation that had (and still has) offices around the world. At the time I worked there, for an office in the eastern US, we were contractor for an equally large government 3-letter agency, which I will call ABC for purposes of this discussion.

Besides engineering services, we also provided public relations services too. My job was to edit ABC's many documents to make them understandable and palatable to the public and other regulators.

On my first day on the job, I and four other new hires were taken to a Project Manager's office for a sort of intro discussion. He closed the door and said "We do all this work for ABC, but our primary job is to make ABC not look stupid."

So out of the five main people from ABC that I worked with, one was a Jehovah's Witness who handed out religious pamphlets at meetings, one was an environmental whack job, one had some very weird personal lifestyle choices, as he would show up at meetings with different injuries... scratches on his arms, a black eye, etc, and only two out of the five seemed like normal people.

Several years later on that job, ABC was still making stupid decisions at a tectonic pace, but we were still working to make them look NOT-STUPID. I finally left there as work was just too repetitive and mundane.