This looks to me to be a recipe for adhering to a standard set of documents and roles, not a recipe for empirically investigating reality as it is, together with other investigators.

Reasonable. However, this doesn't make it unuseful as an example. The set of instructions on how to run a McDonalds, for example, is an exceedingly efficient piece of, essentially, software. (Which can be seen in how widely it has propagated.) Likewise here.