Scott and Roger,

To me another part of this discussion comes back to confusion or disagreement on the definition of Stakeholder Needs(Goals) vs Requirements and Validation vs Verification.

Re-writing as a two needs: (I like to make sure not just to write the need in a simple form but then add the why.
[Business Need: We need to achieve a 20% profit margin.
Why: In order to make our time investment valuable compared to other opportunities.]

[Customer Need: The car needs to last seven years without repairs as long as the owner maintains the car according to a certain maintenance schedule and doesn’t have an accident.
Why: Our previous research has shown that consumers will pay more for a car with a higher useful lifetime. Our research has also shown that our part cost vs reliability spike once the failure rate equivalent to a design lifetime of 7 years is exceeded. This will let be achieve a 20% profit margin because we can charge X without excess cost.]

[Requirement: The results of running the lifetime-quality-test 2025 Ver3 for sedans on the vehicle design will predict fewer than 1% of cars will have a warranty repair during their first 7 years of usage, with a 90% confidence level.
Observation: The lifetime-quality-test is a version controlled document the describes the procedure for how components are tested.]

Writing the requirement is coming to an agreement in the present day on how we will define a way we can measure to say a design is complete. Its making sure we have an agreed stopping point in the design.
On defining what success means in the present.

We then execute the design and verify the design meets the requirement in order to tell the engineers to stop working.

Then in 7 years we validate whether the design met the assumed customer need of operating for 7 years and if meeting that Customer Need led to the Business need being met.
Validation is where we do the big lesson learning. This is where we know take time to think and make judgements about the inference processes and estimates we made in the design and whether they conformed to reality or not and therefore if we need to change or update them.
It’s also the time where we should check if meeting the assumed customer need led to acheiving the overarching outcome of higher profitability. If not we should question the assumptions that lead us to define the Customer Need the way we did.