Held together by chewing gum, baling wire...and paper
That's a really interesting take on it, gb, and it's plausible. A kludgy original design would need an army of people watching over it, tracking problem reports, commanding responses through filing the right forms, budgeting money, all the things a bureaucracy is meant to do.
From this, we could formulate Baikie's Law: The cleaner the design of any space vehicle, the smaller the bureaucracy needed to operate it.