I’ve been following the Building Integrity series on the tower (past Boing), and it goes into a lot of detail on the engineering configuration, the engineering analysis process, and some of the political calculations involved.
Summary: It seems like they did not have Top Experts on the original engineering reports, and it also seems like they do not have Top Experts on the fix team. Or at least, in both cases, if the people were Top Experts they were not sufficiently insulated from the political dimensions to give forthright engineering assessments, instead capitulating to demands for cost-saving (and inadequate) solutions.
