That's a pretty poor description of Enlightenment era techniques. Madison in particular did a ridiculous amount of historic study on what had been done previous to the United States.
Which meant roughly piss all, if you're talking optimal governmental organization or quantifiable danger
Can't say we're doing much better now, to a fair extent (due in no small part just because of simple inertia and whatnot), but the tools, methodology, and data, necessary to actually have a go at making an optimal governmental system that isn't functionally half snake oil and a quarter alcohol, just didn't
exist prior to a handful of decades ago, and are only starting to become something vaguely worth a damn in recent-ish years to boot. Intensive study of bad/nonexistent data, with relatively sub-par methodology and basically no tools worth mention isn't particularly meaningful, y'know?
Not to disparage the folks' efforts, exactly, but there's a reason working in the sort of conditions with a similar suite of techniques and tools is not what you'd call a prospect being salivated over by folks working in similar fields and on similar issues, nowadays. Some things that were built off some of it as a foundation or earlier starting point or whatev' is more of a thing, but most of that kind of junk in present usage just... doesn't really look much like what they came from, save maybe in a shared terminology or rough outline sort of way.
It was good for its time and in other ways, but its time was also shit and we're talking optimal organization, not academic or ideological rigor or whatever. Madison was physically incapable of studying and observing the sort of information needed for that sort of project (to no small part because it didn't exist and functionally could not be acquired with the infrastructure, technology, and methodology of the time) to be anything but functionally guesswork, and what he did have to work with was at best limited and at worst outright grossly misleading (and that to an extent even beyond what modern efforts have to deal with, which is a hell of a thing).
They tried their damnedest and managed a fair amount that held up to one extent or another, in one sense or another, but so did geocentrists and humorists. Respect is due, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't throw most everything they did out the window or call their stuff good in anything but a sort of relative sense contextual to their time. When you're talking optimal for the enlightenment era, you're more talking least suboptimal for the time in question, heh. Not entirely sure we can manage too terribly much better yet, to be fair, but still. Ratification era might as well have happened on another planet for the extent it's relevant to proposing the question in question today, or analyzing where/if things have substantially cocked up as opposed to being your average snafu. Growth might have broken a confederacy, but the US has long been more some kind of mutant bastard of one that doesn't much look or act anything like 'em.
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