You seem to attribute certainl motivations to the PIs based on some misconceptions of the incentives and constrains for doing research. It is true that scientif

You seem to attribute certainl motivations to the PIs based on some misconceptions of the incentives and constrains for doing research. It is true that scientific software engineering is undervalued and this is one of the many issues in modern science. However attributing this to PIs wanting to do everything themselves is completely off the mark. One of the biggest issues in science today is that PIs can't do anything themselves, they, after having been trained as scientist for years, become glorified managers and administrators. The reason why they can't and don't want to hire software engineers to build well designed software is because they don't have any money for it and it is very mismatched with their incentives. If a PI gets a grant for a project, they typically get a constrained budget to achieve the scientific goals of the project. There is usually no money (and it would not be approved) to engineer well designed software, because that doesn't produce scientific outcomes. Now in the situations when there is budget for this, which are the super large institutional research initiatives, like e.g. CERN, they build incredibly well designed software. The SKA for example will have the largest storage cloud in the world. If one wants better designed scientific software one needs to seriously overhaul the scientific funding process and quite significantly increase funding.