Why are some things so difficult - to take apart?

[A G Wood]

In fact many modern cars are not as difficult to service as they appear; many have 'short-cuts' which are only made known to authorised dealers, whilst the rest of us are left to dismantle half the car. 

Sometimes even the authorised dealers have to dismantle half the car too, due to the pernicious embuggerance factor mentioned above. We used to reckon that they had an in-house competition at the design stage to see which division could make it the most awkward for the poor old dealership tech to perform a certain task.  Bonus points if the department could also develop a 'special tool' to do the job. For a good example of embuggerance from my day,  on one popular Australasian sedan, if your HVAC control unit packed it in [usually down to an internal electronic component fail]  it was necessary to remove the entire dashboard and instrument panel assembly A pillar to A pillar- everything you see when you sit in the front seat- (a two man job btw) to remove and replace said control unit. The dealership I worked at, we would typically replace 1-2  a month.  It wasn't until the last gasp of the model line that they finally made easy replacement possible by making the glove compartment liner removable from inside the car. Word was on the street that the interior styling team hadn't liased with the HVAC team...