[mattbrewsbytes]

Working in larger organizations means your role as a software engineer isn't making decisions on technology or even how an entire solution comes together. You are going to run into all sorts of personalities, deal with it and do the best job you can within the parameters given to you. Its very possible your role isn't exposed to the trade-offs, compromises and agreements being made with stakeholders to fully understand how they arrived at whatever the direction it is that you believe if you were in their shoes you would have made better decisions. Is it possible many of the complexities of their decisions just aren't exposed? Not in any secret way or that you are "lowly dev" or anything like that, its likely in a larger org not wanting to drag engineers into endless marathons of meetings because it takes away from their time building stuff. Its simply not in your job description like doing the bookkeeping isn't either.

You could see if the product/architect folks would let you tag along to some of these discussions as career development and so you can get a deeper understanding of what you're working on. It sounds like you dislike working in larger organizations where you feel more like a cog and would rather work in a much smaller organization where you have multiple roles. You'll need to think about if those smaller companies/startups can match your financial and lifestyle needs (I assume you spend time with your kids and aren't going to "no-life" a job). I came from an organization numbering in thousands of people to one where the entire size of the company is like 500 and about 100 engineers, totally fits what I want, much less BigCompany bullshit. Sounds like you need to find an organization where you can wear multiple hats and have some decision making capability, another thing to explore might be managing a team - multiple hats, some decision making on solutions, lot more involvement with product/architect folks.