So much in your assessment here Brian contains enough for suggest our Industry Committees to take a bare look at themselves.
I love your "It's a hypochrondriacal assessment of the expert by non-experts". To me it's sounding like "Where can we spot the expert's flaws?".
To me it's the pervasive Kiwi attitude of "yes, but our unique-to-New Zealand-way-of-things doesn't have to be visionary. It's too scary and won't suit us. We can do better but don't know how (because we can't totally accept our failures) to overcome our malaise of "can't do that because it's so different to what we've known".