As a software engineer, you and your colleagues are trying to make the most functional, sound and bug-free product possible to sell to customers. The F1 management is trying to induce a bunch of competing engineering teams to build cars that when raced together on a circuit produce entertaining racing that draws a crowd and TV audience - they aren't trying to sell the cars to anyone. Given this substantial difference, I don't believe that the formal specifications written by a software engineer and those written by the F1 management should be optimised in the same way.
If the regulations were too precise F1 would become a spec series, since modern technology would allow most of the teams to converge upon more or less a single optimal solution given well-defined and simple geometric constraints on the car design. As things stand this is almost the case, with the cars being generally very similar and the most significant differences being primarily due to rule-bending innovations like the double diffuser, flexi-wing, F-duct, blown diffuser, mass damper et al.
In other words, if the rules were more precisely defined then there would be even less diversity and originality on display in the cars than there is at the moment. The F1 specifications are really a game played by the management and the teams in which the designers try to bend the somewhat vaguely defined and enforced rules and the management allows for a little of this, but not so much that the top teams are able to obtain a huge performance advantage or such that the cars in general regain too much downforce or become unsafe. The F1 management has no reason to clamp down on every rule-bending innovation in draconian fashion, nor should they (at least not unless they change a lot of other things about the formula, for example by switching to "
divergent governance" with parameter-based specifications if that be feasible).
Adrian Newey is playing the same game that all of the teams play in complicity with the F1 management, and of course it's in his interests to encourage the F1 management to regard his own rule-bending innovations as just permissible and the other teams' best ideas as being over the line. F1 is a sport and therefore not an entirely serious endeavour, so a little competitive fibbing and misdirection by the teams about their designs harms no-one and is part of the fun (although for reasons of sportsmanship one prefers the drivers and teams not to lie regarding their conduct during races, which is a different matter).
