However, plowing through a weekend occasionally does have its place, granted everyone agrees it’s crucial to get the task done.

Just imagine an MMO support team who has identified a critical bug on the live servers… I can’t picture them sitting on a beach Sunday, while the paying subscribers light the forums on fire in frustration.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that software is nigh impossible to schedule effectively (the Standish Group published a report claiming that 90% of software projects are delivered late, and around two thirds are deemed a failure, for example). Take into account also that – unlike aircraft design, which tends to slip by enormous amounts behind its schedule (take the Eurofighter for example) – there is usually a completely immovable deadline in games development (more often than not imposed by the marketing wombles who insist on bringing all games out at the same time at the busiest times of the year).

Could you please cite reliable sources demonstrating that aircraft design and manufacture is controlled by management methods to the extent that no overtime or ‘crunch’ is required? I’d wager there were a few midnight pizzas involved getting that A-380 to market.

So it might very well not be “rocket science”, but “it’s not rocket science” is invariably little more than a fatuous remark made by people with insufficient knowledge of the topic at hand.