Shipyards are very tribal in how they operate…so I’m not surprised it took them a while to get there.
But there’s also the fact that machining extremely large irregularly shaped objects made of unforgiving materials to very precise tolerances are basically opposing requirements.
The other point related to shipyard workforce quality is…if you want better workers, pay more. Or build a glut in the labor pool of skilled laborers. The shipyards aren’t incentivized to go better/faster on their own via fixed price contracts. Which may sound totally insane and counter to how fixed price works in theory land…but that’s pretty much how that goes more often than it should.
We were technologically capable of adapting the Heny Ford assembly process well before the VA class submarine. What prompted the change was the fall of the Soviet Union and political pressure inside the beltway in the 1990s whereupon policy makers kept asking "why do we need submarines?" instead of writing the Navy blank checks to combat the Russian boogeyman. Along with that, policymakers railed against the Seawolf's design requirements to be able to unilaterally defeat a CSG in a blue-water engagement as wasteful because haha who else operates CSGs besides the USN? The output was a cheaper platform infused mostly with intel community design requirements that sacrificed ASUW capability for INT, especially because the engineers royally fucked up the propulsion efficiency curves.
Again, oops.
So we just self-flagellate over the analogue of trying to defeat a company sized element with a 6-shot revolver and a bandolier of 50 extra bullets.
As for workforce quality - yep, shipyards were paying what is now sub minimum wage just a few years ago for journeyman level craftsmen. The poor wages and spartan working conditions were captured in this riveting documentary about how a shipyard bubba worked hard to send his son to
the federal boxing academy USNA.
But in the meantime, the average idle time for a sub undergoing a depot level maintenance period is 225 days. Of course, this doesn't account for all the shoddy patch-jobs they sweep under the rug to let the crew fix in a pierside maintenance period to get the boat out 'on time' (meaning, they meet the date that was already pushed back 3 times), because that doesn't actually exist anywhere on paper. And this practice of buttoning up broken shit to meet already overdue deadlines isn't unique to submarines.
Also, did you know that if you had a master's degree or PhD in clinical psychology, that the Navy will pay you up to $48,000 a year to provide mental health treatment to sailors?
Yes, I used some hyperbole, mostly for humor. But apparently that was lost on some overly sensitive people.