Despite all the differences we might be able to spot, one major parameter, I believe, to be “Scale”. I mean we can deal with building a bridge from atomic level, but we simply do not do that , because in the scale of a bridge, things tend to be more deterministic and somehow straightforward (we could make it more challenging of course, but we wont).
In the material science case, however, the scale makes the things more “statistical” and not really deterministic, and there are way too many parameters and factors that can change the whole answer entirely.