Comment by londons_explore

> SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example.

Not necessarily. Your engine which used to have 200 sensors perhaps now only has 8. But you now don't know when temperatures were close to melting point in a specific part of the engine. When something goes wrong, you are less likely to identify the precise cause because you have less data.

Many of those sensors are not to enable the rocket to fly at all, but merely for later data analysis to know if anything was close to failure.

In yesterdays launch, if the engines had more sensors musk probably wouldn't have said "an oxygen/fuel leak", but would have been able to say "Engine #7 had an oxygen leak at the inlet pipe, as shown by the loud whistling noise detected by engine #7's microphone array"