Completely backwards paridigm for me. In my world, us dumb structural guys are only trusted with the 2-d linear stuff with canned elements and and BC's and the mech guys get to do the cool stuff.
If you are strac enough to even talk about this, why do you work somewhere where you have to...
Interesting thread. An analogous situation to this discussion is one I frequently remind my crew about - there is no justification for spending $100,000 in analysis to save a thousand puonds of steel in a static structure.....assuming that the structure is on land, that field fab is acceptable...