joking aside . . . yeah, they should have just taken a single Timberwolf apart & study to get the specs as well as cast forms for any machining. I mean we may have ended up with something like Mad Dog I vs II where there were cosmetic differences but . . .
That's probably how they ended up with the
Mad Cat sheltered workshop, by dissasembling examples and studying their components. That sort of reverse-casting rarely works out well even on simple things (eg Toys, where it's commonly used), let alone complicated machinery.
The removal of the Kerensky Giftake from the homeworlds was a plan that was thrown together at the time as the situation required, and not exactly a fair comparison. That they made it out with just that much required the Wolves to essentially sacrifice an entire Galaxy to do such. The weren't exactly in a position to also grab technical data that they might not have even had on hand at the time.
The reference to the hand-built
Mad Cats is in
Objectives: Clans, p28. It suggests that the Wolves never had the blueprints for the design in the Inner Sphere to begin with. This, in turn, was the result of a policy of deliberately neglecting the OZ that Vlad enforced (And is explained in more detail in
Wars of Reaving). So if you want to blame anyone, blame him.
Vlad was a great warrior, but a terrible leader