Its arguable that a significant part of the defeat of the Germans on the Eastern Front was due to the Germans loving to over-engineer things. Especially tanks. And had an obsession with having big guns on them. To the point they could only go 5-10 mph and if anything broke on it it would have to go back to Germany because the design was so weird/complex. Cant remember if it was the Rat or not, but there was even a tank where if you wanted to shoot the cannon somebody had to get out and unbolt it from the hull because it was so big it made it unwieldy to drive.
Meanwhile Soviets just said “Haha T-34 factory go brrrr”, and was easy enough to make and use that there are stories of workers completing the tanks and driving them straight to the front. Illiterate farmer Vasily from the Urals could help weld on parts and then go take part in the fight.
It was probably a factor, but I don’t think a significant one. You could make the argument that if they made more mass-producible armor that they could have put more on the front, but that would have likely further strained the serious supply line issues they were facing. They also were hurting for industrial materials and fuel, so just building more wasn’t really in the cards.
It was, especially by mid-war a no win scenario for German tank production. They could mass produce only Panzer IIIs and run out of material and importantly crews, or they could swing heavy into making super tanks and not have enough of them to do anything of value.
Both were bad choices that couldn’t be fixed by engineers.
