I didn't say it was better. I said it might be better for some people.
My attitude towards houses is similar to yours. I am obviously no professional concerning
boat building, but I know a thing or two about building buildings. I'm not an
engineer, but I have 40 architects and engineers working for me right now on one big
project.
My apartment is in a 130 year old building with solid brick walls 1.2 meters thick. After 130 years, no settling, cracking, or anything, despite the adjoining building having been obliterated by a Nazi bomb in WWII. It's wonderful living behind walls like that -- they provide thermal and acoustic mass, and they breathe. But it's an irrational way to build, costing a fortune today and eating up a big part of the
interior space, with those walls.
My lake house is new construction, which I built. The basement walls are reinforced concrete 40cm thick, on top of a concrete "raft" which is 75cm thick, all more than 3 meters underground. The neighbors teased me about building Hitler's bunker, when we were doing the underground part. Above that, reinforced concrete columns and floor structures, filled with Hebel blocks, then faced with a thick layer of
insulation, then stone. The roof is almost 1000m2 (10,000 square feet) of solid copper sheet with standing seams. It took about three years to build and fit out -- I've built tall office building in less time than that, but it was a labor of love.
Overkill? Absolutely. But I look at buildings with a professional eye, the way you look at
boats. It gives me pleasure, and I was willing to pay for that pleasure.
But would I insist that any house built a different way, a more rational way, is crap? No way!! Other people have different priorities, needs, and desires, from me.
Now rational mass production, and shoddy production, are not necessarily the same thing. I've seen the shoddy McMansions you are talking about. Residential construction in the U.S. is of generally poor quality, because our homebuilding industry is just generally poor, building to a
price without any regard to quality at all. There is no comparison at all between the car industry, which produces generally better and better quality, very efficiently -- even if cars are basically disposable and definitely not designed to be kept running forever. And our homebuilding industry, which builds ever worse crap.
Some mass produced
boats are crap, but not all or even most of them. The existence of a liner does not prove that a
boat is crap, per se. As someone noted, even some better builders, like
Island Packet and Hallberg Rassey, are starting to use partial liners. I don't like liners, and don't have one on my boat, but I think they could be not as bad, if designed carefully and well executed.
I think it's a mistake to make categorical statements about things like this.
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