Years ago, there were a series of articles in IEEE journals on flight management engineering of both Airbus and Boeing.
The prevailing take-away I got from reading the articles written by the Airbus engineers was that they thought pilots were incompetent cowboys who waste fuel. They made design choice upon design choice to cut off pilot judgement and replace it with technocratic assumptions of efficiency.
When I fly, I am paying for the judgement of the guys up front, who I believe have the highest level of enlightened self-interest there could be: those pilots will usually be the first to arrive at the crash site if they make a big mistake. If they think it is prudent to burn some additional fuel, then burn away.
Yes, but what can you expect from engineers (Remember the joke about the engineer and the guillotine?). It’s another case of “to a man with a hammer in his hand...”, and was also a big issue in the Apollo program.