Essentially, yes. What may look to a customer like modern e-ticketing is processed exactly the same behind the scenes as the handwritten paper tickets of ye olden times. If you think about all of the different players in airline ticketing, from airlines themselves to travel agents, GDSs, IATA, ATPCO, and of course other airlines, it’s easy to see where the complexity arises. It’s also why LCCs can do everything so much more cheaply - by stripping out all of that complexity, they don’t need anywhere near as much development work. But for legacy/network airlines to work properly, it all has to be there in the background.

IMO the OP simply adds yet another case to my argument that FT is completely divorced from the real world. He used words such as ‘random’ and ‘vanilla’ but then proceeded to tell us exactly how he made his booking complex enough to require manual intervention