One of the best books I have read in recent years, somehow immensely relevant now: _Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story_ by John Bloom, that explores exactly what went wrong, the bankruptcy filing and so on. I wonder if you might find your experiences reflected there.
> "highly paramteric like fastners, gears, 3D printed boxes"
1. These parts should probably be on McMaster. If you are not using them straight from there, you better have a _great_ reason as to why not when it comes up in the design review.
2. Solidworks has Smart Fasteners, Inventor has Spur Gear Component Generator, Sketch->Extrude->Shell takes 30 seconds, so not sure why 3D printed boxes would be faster or better with this for most stuff. Also, this stuff is easily solved by things like the component library and configurations.
There is also all the helpful work that Mathworks does such as Simulink ...
Also, consider that MATLAB works much more like how one would write on paper (including 1-indexing) and is what people are used to at this point.
> If an engineer came to you and said “So for this project, I put all the code, input data, output data and comments scattered about one big two-dimensional array with no type safety, no portability, no scalability, no security, no variable names, no code re-use, no unit tests, no integration tests, no abstractions and no error handling”
So, how is this different from engineers and MATLAB?
Irrelevant but spreadsheets have always struck me as one of the most beautiful pieces of software that we use. Automatically updating calculations, programming logic complex anough for most ERPs, using it is a database, easy organisation of data, graphs -- it has it all. From both a user and developer perspective, they are one of the most diverse tools on a computer. MS may make terrible software sometimes, but damn it, does Excel run the world.