Because the British approach to anything goes along the following lines:
Right. We want to do this. Let’s find some cunning electrical or mechanical way to do it. Does it work? Jolly good. Is it likely to kill anybody using it? No? Slap it out there. Job done.
The German approach goes:
Ve vant to do zis. Jetzt spend ze next six months in einem lab doing maths. After zat, make ein test model. Does it vork? Sehr gut. Improve it. Does it still vork? Ausgezeichnet. Improve it noch more. Un zen again until it is perfekt!
German obsessions with making things to a quality greater than that which is needed cost them the war in Russia. German engineers could make one high quality Panzer III or IV whilst the Soviet Union could bash out a dozen T34s in the same time. The T34 incorporated a lot of short cuts which made it paradoxically cheaper and easier to manufacture and repair than the high precision German ones whilst at the same time being better at the job than the Panzers were.
German engineering looks very nice and works very well. But it is expensive and often unnecessary to go to the lengths they do unless you actually require a very high precision machine that is expensive to buy and to repair. Which in most cases you don’t.
Having said that, the Americans got nazis to build their Moon rockets because they did need high precision machines. And spent $23.4 billion on it. Here’s a Russian rocket:
Vostok, a modified R7 that doesn’t look as though it ought to work at all, but the predecessor of which launched the first ever satellite, and the above got Gagarin into space before any American did.
Sputnik?
It’s a beach-ball with metal welded on. But it did 1,400 orbits of the Earth in the three months it was up there.
Things don’t have to look nice to be good. Unless you’re a German.
I blame the EU.