Optical system development requires software tools to design lenses, mechanical components, sensors, and image signal processing (ISP) pipelines. Historically, these tools are operated independently and do not provide insight into complete system performance. As a result, development teams often incur time and cost inefficiencies by designing, building, and testing hardware prototypes that either fail to meet requirements or significantly exceed them. Optical systems are therefore frequently over-designed in one or more areas—such as lens tolerances, sensor bit depth, or ISP complexity—to mitigate risk. End-to-end simulation offers a path to eliminate these inefficiencies and accelerate time-to-market. In this work, we simulate a complete imaging system and demonstrate a method for identifying a minimally viable solution that meets the performance requirements of an object detection application. Using the imaging system simulator ImSym, we model the full imaging chain, including lens behavior, detector characteristics and noise, ISP routines, and straylight effects. These elements are combined to generate simulated images that enable validation of system performance prior to hardware fabrication.