We certainly had some damage: a major roadway along Capitol Lake collapsed, some large masonry blocks fell off the corner of an old bank building, and the Capitol dome was set rolling like a top on its base (at the time, it was held in place by gravity alone, but it’s since been pinned to the building)!

The structural building code (the International Building Code, IBC) in Washington in general specifies what loads must be applied to a structure (earthquake, wind, snow) and how the structure must be adequate to withstand these loads and allow all occupants to escape after an event (eg earthquake).

An engineers gain nothing if a building is over- OR under- built, as they are paid based on a finished set of plans and calculations, so it isn't fair to say engineers are shortsighted. In contrast, the owners/developers of a building want to legally build as inexpensively possible (of course) because they are a business and they can absolutely be short-sighted, but the building code still requires all structures to be engineered to allow all occupants to escape.

That depends. You don’t want to overbuild just for the sake of overbuilding, that’s just make things more expensive needlessly. We still just want to design things to meet its expected requirements, you just want to expand what those requirements are. We would definitely benefit from more infrastructure being built to last longer and be more resilient. But here in Washington we don’t really need to build things to withstand tornadoes. There’s an old saying in engineering: “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes a good engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”