I am hiring one in Krakow! Seriously though, in a team of 10 business analysts I can barely afford 1 data engineer. Business analysts tend to cost less and also be more "business focuses", so they are an easier sell to management.

You seem to have an engineering problem, so hire engineers and perhaps fire some of those analysts. Don't make your business depend on someone else's tailored IT products, they will reap the profits you could be making.

Yes, I am a bit confused by that statement too. Isn't it good that complex tasks are handled by specialized people? Maybe it is my bias as an ex-big data engineer / current data scientist, but it seems to me that a lot of the tooling is is pretty simple as it can be (yes yes complacency is the enemy of good, I mean no obvious things to improve as low-hanging fruit)