Why should Honda listen to old farts like us? They know better. Japanese engineers have very definite presumptions about who makes decisions in what they feel to be important matters.
I have only worked at Canon in Japan, translating Japanese user-manuals into English and German, but was told never to suggest changes to their products, since their R&D dept would "lose face" if a suggestion came from someone outside and, heaven forbid, it turned out to be a good one.
The very first manual I translated into English was some Canon 35mm camera with a bayonet lens which you could change. The manual came to 11 pages. I was sat down with these little Japanese guys and told that I was making their product look simple. The manual must be complicated, they said, or customers might feel that have purchased an inferior product. That was their thinking and it was not my job to argue. So I re-did the manual and got it up to 32 pages, with lots of diagrams, referring from one page to the other, and they were quite happy. They had Japanese at the plant quite capable of speaking English, but wanted someone who had done English at university and who spoke English as a first language. Hitherto their English manuals had strange sentences in it, much like Chinese stuff is today.
So my motto at Canon became, "If its not complicated, its no good". This applies to nearly all Japanese produced equipment. This is their way of thinking that the customer will feel he is getting a good product which has had lots of R&D. I must say that when Japanese engineers design something, they research it thoroughly and when it is released, it works. No come-backs for dodgy design or flaws.
Edit: Just looked up my job sheet back in 1968: が困難に見えるように
