I seriously doubt that they have had remotely the number of skilled man-hours as the most popular open source codecs. The source code would back that assertion up, if they're doing things like simply groveling through 2^16 combinations of things looking for the best.

Either they weren't skilled or they didn't have time; I favor the latter theory. Feel free to advocate for the former if you like. But you can't have it both ways, because the results were clearly not well-skilled people spending lots of time on the problem. One or the other is not true.