This problem, as well as the one you critiqued previously, are not “meaningless brainteasers”. They are impelling the student to assess how to solve problems by examining the underlying conditions and find simplifying assumptions and methods rather than to use rote methodology in a brute force approach, which is a critical thinking skill being rapidly lost by successive generations of engineers who have become far to conditioned to just feed all analyses into integrated simulation tools without thinking about whether the question can be bounded with a more simple calculation and some rational assumptions. Working through these kinds of problems such as finding a limit condition are crucial to developing that intuition for how to approach “real world” problems in the most efficient manner, and provide fundamentals to build upon to apply more complex phenomena such as deformation, contact phenomena, et cetera, in the same way that having a first semester chemistry student do basic product/reaction equations for even though the reality is that many chemical reactions are highly dynamic and will not come to a stoichiometric equilibrium quickly if at all.
As it happens, not only have I taken an wide array of courses in the mechanical engineering curriculum but have also been a teaching assistant for for both Statics and Mechanics of Materials courses and the lab for the latter; we used Hibbeler but Beer & Johnson is a popular choice. I also worked on development of tutorial software for statics, dynamics, and mechanics of materials to illustrate critical principles to students, as well as subsequently having worked as a working mechanical engineer approaching three decades in heavy machinery and aerospace industries, so I think I have a little bit of authoritative knowledge about how “engineering courses are structured” and whether the problem sets drawn from this text are solvable and illustrative of useful principles.
Stranger