No. Engineers design a project to the specs that they are paid to design them to. If they are told to design it as cheap as possible they will do so. If they are told to design it using only round tubing, they will design it with round tubing. The cheapest option is not always picked. If that paint that saved you $5 will only last a year, they aren't going to go that route. An engineer is not going to make a decision like this and use cost as a justification and actually get it approved. If there is a structural reason that makes sense and it saves money, that's great. But B&M's have had round tubing since they started making them. No one told an engineer to save a few bucks by redesigning the system, and no engineer said hey we can save a hundred thousandth(.00001) of the budget on this project by changing how they look and somehow got that approved by management.
I get that an engineer is supposed to not over-engineer things due to cost, but this is absolutely not what happened here.