[noodle]

WRT your experience at Amazon -

A lesson you don't learn in school, and is even hard to learn in professional life, is that engineering is about getting the best work done inside the constraints you're presented with. Sometimes its time constraints, money/resource constraints, business constraints, political constraints, environmental constraints, etc..

You'll never be given a perfectly well thought out spec/design/etc and infinite time and resources to build the absolute best solution. You'll have to compromise on things when you're doing real work. And sometimes people will disagree with the compromises you had to make, like you are with this team at AMZN.