The engineering world revolves around expertise. We are looking up to people who know stuff or can do things. And for a good reason. Those are the people who can figure things out, build cool tools, and share their knowledge. We are all better off because these people are around.
But there is a darker side to the expertise. All the years of school, experience, time spent on honing one's skills, create invisible walls in expert's mind. Deeply learned patters, preferences, rules, the dos and the donts. You no longer see the problems as they are, but you see them through the filter of what you already know. The hypothesis for solving problems, consciously or subconsciously, get rejected, not based on the merit, but based on ingrained patterns. This will never work or this is not how it's done.
In many situations, this is great. This IS the expertise: the ability to reject the dead-ends without spending days down unsolvable rabbit holes, and find the solution quicker.
But sometimes, every once in a while, the experts tend to reject the ideas before fully exploring them, leaving some good solutions on the table. Often for reasons, that they themselves would be hard-pressed to explain. They may have simply learned long ago that this is not how things are done.
