Let me work with your analogy a bit. What if your dad's job was to install sound systems designed around poor quality speaker components, using expensive DSP systems that add a lot of latency to the signal and draw lots of power?

He knows he could build better components than the ones he uses if he put the time in, and create a better overall system design with a better price/performance by applying state of the art knowledge, but people prefer to pay him to combine commodity parts of questionable design in the standard, proven, but clearly suboptimal way.

Now where is his job satisfaction?

If you really wanted to stretch the analogy, maybe imagine the expensive DSPs he is expected to install all forward a record of any audio played on them to a shadowy government agency.