being a good engineer is also understanding when something is a waste of time because the gain is insignificant 99% of the time
I think siblings point needs to be made more sharply: this could've gone somewhere good, "I evaluated it and found the gain was not worth the cost to change", but instead went to "the gain from a change is insignificant 99% of the time, so it's not worth understanding it".
The latter is poor engineering.
It seems like all of your comments are like this. Consider stopping that!
Using "good engineering" as an argument against learning is definitely an interesting approach.