It's unlikely imo that any decisions were made expressly for the purpose
of shaving corners; that there may have been poor judgment or even
engineering mistakes is quite possible but I'd wager there wasn't
anything the folks involved did that was any different than they did
routinely and had worked in the past.

You're stupid and you don't know who was in a position to make the
disasterous decisions. The BP company man and the TransOcean tool
pusher, BOTH ON THE RIG, under pressure from their respective
management, made the decisions. THe BP CEO or any other upper
management, who control the "muli-million dollar decisons", were never
in the loop. The shortcuts saved them 3 days, at $1,000,000 day,
that's a lot of savings for the level employees that made the
disasterous decisions.

I'll wager that, of the things the OP listed in the post, all or most
differed from previous wells. And I'll wager that the decision making
process was flawed and influenced by the cost savings, especially
becasue they already a month or more behind.

It will come out in the criminal trials.

-Zz