You sound like you somewhat understand politics more than you really understand engineering. Engineering is not math. Neither you can practice it in an idealize

You sound like you somewhat understand politics more than you really understand engineering. Engineering is not math. Neither you can practice it in an idealized world and winning all arguments by showing a pretty table of numbers; you already cited tradeoffs and even with just that they are more often than not subject to opinions, and then I remind that not even all the "tradeoff" are known (far, very very far, from that). And big projects are obviously highly integrated with politics from the very beginning. Now I understand that there exist some people still named engineers that are only preoccupied about how to make a mechanical item solid and light enough to satisfy a requirement, or how to design a really cool and fast hash table. This is still completely in the engineering field, but only constitute a (tiny) part of it. And even then it is dubious to consider they are either not at all preoccupied about how to work efficiently with their peers, or not even subject to that kind of consideration.