As an engineer myself I have to say that I don’t actually see much difference between the two. Regulations should be followed unless there’s a damn good reason not to, and in that case you’d better be able to convince the relevant authorities to grant you some kind of justfiable exemption.
There’s a saying: Regulations are written in blood. Most of the safety-related regulations in this world were not written by some bureaucrat who was trying to give the little guy a hard time. They were written by groups of experts in the field who investigated some kind of disaster or tragedy and were trying to prevent the next one.
