How do you propose municipal planning departments process, audit, and test the thousands of building permit drawings they receive every year? Have a staff of hundreds of engineers of their own? The professional reliance model seems to work well enough, but that isn't to say it is the optimal model out there.
I feel like that's something that could be at least in part be automated by a computer. If everyone is following a standard you should be able to feed the data in and start doing pass/fail tests on requirements. I assume that's what people who sign off on plans kind of already do anyway.
The engineer's work is largely edge cases that don't fit into prescriptive code. Ie, that is substantially the system in place: We have a set of things that can be done without an engineer because they were already designed and approved by a group of engineers, and for everything else it is bespoke engineering.
