The question I would then ask is how a steel framed concrete reinforced building built from the outside in have a 2.25 second symmetrical free-fall of it's outer structure caused by fire?1
The house of cards analogy is inept, i think, because of the symmetry of the free-fall.
1https://www.nist.gov/pba/questions-and-answers-about-nist-wtc-7-investigation
It was a steel frame building.
The concrete did not play much role in the structure from what I can tell.
So dont think of the building as being reinforced from the inside vs outside. It is one structural system that works together.
An engineers has to primary work against 2 forces (very basically) the vertical forces from the weight of the building and internal loading. And then the lateral forces from wind. The whole thing has to work together to distribute all the forces together down to the foundations.
In WTC7 the outer skin provided most of the lateral strength against wind, while the internal columns provided almost all of the vertical support.
So using the domino structure as an example.
Imagine building a domino tower. The dominos are very good at taking a vertical load, but if you pushed the tower even slightly it would topple.
So to fix this, you wrap the tower with paper all around. The paper cant take much vertical load, but is stiff enough to hold the tower together if you give it a slight push. It all works very well, until one day someone pulls a domino piece out from inside. The whole inside would collapse first, then the paper would stand for a bit before crumbling in, because it cant stand by itself.
You can test this yourself at home.
(if anyone find a problem with my metaphor because it does not exactly match the conditions of WTC7, go have a long hard look in a mirror first, before you tell me otherwise, it was a metaphor)
This is more or less what seems to have happened here.
It was not a silly design choice either, the Architects try to provide as much open floor space as possible for a variety of tenant requirements. This was one way to achieve long floor spans and few internal braced columns.