Fair points. I made my comments with steam locomotives in mind, but I appreciate the more comprehensive description.

And yes, when talking about the most complex economic and scientific revolutions, single factor explanations necessarily fall short. I tend to see technology as something akin to biological evolution, where economic and social pressures drive mathematics, science, and engineering. More generally, we can say "necessity is the mother of invention".

On this point, I often reflect on pre-Columbian copper culture in the Great Lakes region. The natives of that region never developed metallurgy because they didn't need to. They could literally bash out huge nuggets of pure copper straight from the rock and they already had access to lithic material that produced razor sharp edges that self-sharpened with use. They had no pressure to develop for harder metals than copper. Despite their use of the metal, their use of it was a stone age tech, not a bronze age one. I find it a striking example of a people who were highly intelligent, sophisticated, and advanced, but didn't have the need for metallurgy, and thus never put effort toward it. It really reinforces for me the role of external factors in preconditioning and driving technological innovations.