The issue of the rivets was rather over-egged Firstly, No.3 'Best' Wrought Iron was not a cheap second rate material! 'Best' would have been the routine choice for structurual applications and it would have been unusual to specify 'Best Best' No.4. It probably wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference anyway.
Secondly, most ships built in the early 1900's would have been rivetted with iron rivets throughout. Titantic was, if anything, quite unusual for her day in that steel rivets were used on the flatter sections of the hull where it was possible to get the large and cumbersome rivetting guns into place. I'm not entirely convinced by the 'sprung seam' theory anyway. It implies that there was a catastrophic failure of plate joints across four watertight compartments simultaneously and no matter how badly designed Titanic may, or may not, have been, I very much doubt if there was a continous seam between plates over such a long length of the hull! There'd be overlapping plates, strengthing and stiffening members within the hull, bulkheads etc. Far more likely that the iceberg had an eroded sharp underwater protrusion which sliced the hull open as as long been accepted as being the probable scenario. (And there's no definite proof either way from the underwater surveys as far as I'm aware). That's not to say that rivets didn't fail - it'd be a miracle if rivet heads hadn't sheared off in a collision of that nature! However the damage to the hull occurred, the rest of the program was certainly the most comprehensive and well researched account of how the Titanic disaster came about that I've yet seen. Bru (Whose ancestors used to to be ship rivetters!)
