What, you don't wanna ride in an open cabin dune buggy with a 4' lift doing 100km/hr over rocky terrain on a planet with unfamiliar gravity? But it's made of unobtainium and glued together with the blood and gore of your comrades! Fine, you can sit in the completely exposed bird's nest and shoot a low rof machine gun from the 1940's at aliens with flying plasma cannons.
I see what you mean by mentioning that in my youth it really didn't matter how (dys)functional any weapons platform or loadout was so long as it looked mysteriously deadly and rocked the shit out of the baddies. What happened to me that forced me to think logically and practically is a job I got pulled into where forethought, attention to detail to the point of really pissing the bosses and my fellow workers off and designing tools/mechanisms that made life as easy as possible for the user affected my whole way of thinking things through. Yep, I was, you know,
that guy.
The stubborn sharp edged pebble in everyone's shoes that looked at the back end of a project that brought in the most cash in the long run while holding off the folks who only looked at the short term margins as a reason for taking shortcuts and end-arounds that could wipe the quality and reputation of our products clean off the table.
So glad I'm mostly retired out of that pressure cooker so I could revert back to the actual real life lazy ass no fucks to give carefree happy dude, concentrating on helping family and friends with the skillset I acquired from decades gone by. Got'ta be useful one way or another right up to the end of the line.
ooops- apologies for my daydreaming my way through this post.