As a Western engineer, it’s not engineering, it’s management culture you have a problem with. Most engineers I meet want to make their product the best they can, but management actively cracks down on and sabotages these efforts for various reasons, none of them having to do with engineers.

They think that making something worse always takes less time and effort, so if you made something that is more than the bare minimum, they think you’ve wasted their budget.

Also, they don’t care about making a good product, they care about their careers, so if someone else had a good idea, they are incentivised to sabotage it because it either draws time and attention away from the things that would get them promoted. If you think that your new thing could make their work easier as well, and your interests are aligned, see my previous point.

Finally, with customer-facing products, there is also the fact that your better solution might make some bullshit monetisation strategy obsolete.

We’re alienated as fuck from our work, don’t point at us mate.