(French navy apparently didn’t even tell their minister what their policy was. He was a security risk, and anyway they were changed too often to care.)

Today bureaucrats themselves are obsolete, and are being replaced with public-private cooperation and other financial feudalism schemes.

Are the regulators aware of and self-conscious about the gap in knowledge between themselves and those in the industries they regulate? Do they think there is one?

Absolutely. This makes us defer to industry. Industry gets what it wants the same way that I get the higher-ups to agree on the need to draft a new regulation — threaten the destruction of the global financial system. As regulations get more plentiful and more complex the knowledge gap gets more important, especially when regulators deal with large companies that are well-organized.