Sometimes those reasons, unfortunately, do have to do with the fact that they are actual imbeciles.
If you want to be likeable among imbeciles, then you have to emulate one. When in Rome and all that.
When developing and documenting systems, I find it's really important to document Why you are doing things a certain way. What is done, and how its done can often be discerned from looking at the current implementation, but why needs to be explicitly documented.
This is a fundamental insight that a lot of people don’t seem to get. I always refer to this quote to drive home the same point: “There is no such thing as a dysfunctional system, because every system is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets.”