If you can’t trust your data, there’s no point analyzing it—that’s why so many quality improvement projects include measurement system analysis, or MSA.
Like many other areas of manufacturing, it is easy to be dazzled by the “latest and greatest” technology and so overlook simpler, cheaper options that might be more suitable for a particular need.
The purposes for reverse engineering are many and varied, ranging from the need to reproduce an existing product lacking CAD documentation to acquiring sensitive information to determine possible patent infringement