The problem is not with accountants per se but when accountants get promoted to executive positions. They will always run the business purely on a short term profit/cost basis, whereas operations and engineering managers who get promoted will know from experience that you need to spend money in the short term to make money in the long term.

It has been my experience as a consultant and in-house that engineering departments significantly overvalue the R&D they perform. R&D has value, but nowhere near what the engineers think it does, especially when all of the costs of bringing that R&D to market are taken into consideration.

See, for example, Juicero, Bird, Boosted, Magic Leap, Theranos, etc.

Putting this dissenting opinion on HN will likely get you downvoted, but I for one appreciate it. There is a balancing act of profit vs development that us engineers to overlook.

However, some of your examples aren't great IMO. Theranos should have been ONLY R&D, as it was never a product that was ready to bring to market. Same with Magic Leap.

I think also due to Boeing's business of making tin cans move hundreds of miles of hour thousands of feet in the air, means the engineering department should be their primary focus as well, thus all the outrage at the company.

This is a pretty simplistic view of the world. The idea that accountants don’t understand R&D is silly.