I'm guessing they thought it would go viral because even something as inane as this will go viral when people are so starved for anything new about the truck.
I worked on knobs in the appliance world. It's not as straight forward as you might think. A lot of sanding and filing and hands on human approval. Setup a board with knobs 1-5 and see how people like the way they feel. Then do it again with some tweaking tomorrow. And repeat and repeat.