Hard disagree. Perhaps "not smart enough" is too strong a statement but "not capable enough" is certainly correct. Spend enough time in this industry and you'll find plenty of folks who can work well in a vacuum but cannot actually be strong both independently and working in a group setting. The latter has a lot of concrete details attached to it which has nothing to do with either perspective or bias. Ironically, you're applying an accusation of "perspective and bias" with a very sloppy brush of perspective and bias.
I have 20 years in this industry. It’s full of stupid people pointing fingers somewhere else. Any time this is pointed out developers play the special snowflake game and pretend that software is something special or unique, but it isn’t. Everything is measurable just like any other industry.
I have written the fastest network transmission implementation for Node.js and made the front page of HN (under a different account) for creating an original diff algorithm among various other things. While I was doing that I was also holding a part time job in middle management in an unrelated industry. This original software wasn’t written by whining and blaming people for my sadness.
Note that my advice, if followed, has the effect of giving the OP's engineers more space to develop efficient implementations than they would probably get if OP acts on their instincts.
