Money, pipes and europe.

I was reading recently that in europe, a reluctance to use the new vessel codes by industry was overcome when the CEN body commissioned various companies to cost for a identical vessel using the established codes (bs5500/ASME) against the new EN code.
Because the New EN code is very much calculation based as oppoded to the empirical nature of ASME etc, the cost savings were huge and hence the new EN code is becoming more established to due significant savings in cost.

Now this leads me to wonder about pipes, and a story an old engineer was telling me.
He was going to write a book explaining how the existing pipe schedules used in plants throughout the world are far to high and that huge savings could be made by re-engineering the codes to suit.

I'm sceptical, but, i wonder, how cost efficient are the current B3X codes considering they are as old as the hills?

Do the commitee envisage a time when they will be completely re-written?

Piping Design by Rigorous Analysis may provide some savings but the calcs are time consuming (remember the Nukes). But I would definitely NOT reduce the inherent Safety Factors in the code since as can be seen in this forum and elsewhere, numerous UNqualified personnel work in this industry.

Piping Designers ENGINEER piping systems and many CAESAR II Engineers QUALIFY piping systems. Scary stuff.

Also there are many more piping systems in a plant than vessels.