If you need a prototype to find out that your amplifier does not give the results expected then either management does not give you good enough specifications or you do not do enough to ensure you are within the given specifications.
You know simulation is a thing. And if you say the speaker did not fulfill what you thought it would then you should have measured it beforehand.
Just to be clear: I do not say it is a useless feature. Your example is just not really a good one as it shows that you did not do enough during the planing phase. In nearly every engineering discipline finding a mistake one phase later means it will cost about 10x more to fix it. (This is what i hope you learn with this project. Making a few measurements early on could have saved you a lot of problems.)
Software engineering is the worst industry to use as an example as well. A large portion of software projects run over budged, over time or have a massively reduced set of features compared to what is planned beforehand. (And that is before we even ask if it has security critical bugs.)
This industry has not yet really figured out how to manage their projects such that you get the success-rate of for example pure electrical or mechanical engineering. (One reason is that the cost of failure is much lower. So there is less need for getting it right the first time round)