Glad to hear that hasn't been your experience. I've been in both now, but I've seen people I wouldn't spit at if on fire get funding or positions because of the work they produce. A guy known for making grad students cry has a line out the door because people want to be associated with him. He's got the funding and pull to make things happen because he's good at what he does, despite being an impossible prick. I think part of it is that there are very few people of the caliber that people will excuse that behavior from. Not every smart person with a bad attitude gets a pass, but in my experience, there's a threshold past which people will excuse a lot. I think there's a similar thing with money. Not every millionaire can get what they want, but at a certain point of wealth they just can. I totally understand if that's not a universal experience. I was just offering my perspective.

Yes this is something I drill into more junior engineers as much as possible - Simplicity is a design consideration. Your designs need to convey what they are doing as clearly, intuitively, and simply as possible. You invented some new thing that automated everything? Congrats, the next person that needs to do a modification or read the drawing to react to an emergency is definitely going to break it, possibly even hurt themselves. Whenever I look at a drawing I can very quickly tell the quality of an engineer by how intuitive the drawing is - and for the quality of the notes they left when they had to do something complex