You are missing an important motivator of great engineers: we seek out hard, commercially-relevant problems of course, but these problems must also be societal

You are missing an important motivator of great engineers: we seek out hard, commercially-relevant problems of course, but these problems must also be societally relevant and responsible. While our actions may often reflect it only implicitly, many of us take this professional responsibility to society very seriously; we need to be engaged in enterprises that both understand and encourage this. Conversely, when an organization loses engineers over issues of principle, getting them back is essentially impossible.