What have you accomplished in your 20 years in the industry, out of curiosity?

I have written the fastest network transmission implementation for Node.js and made the front page of HN (under a different account) for creating an original diff algorithm among various other things. While I was doing that I was also holding a part time job in middle management in an unrelated industry. This original software wasn’t written by whining and blaming people for my sadness.

Note that my advice, if followed, has the effect of giving the OP's engineers more space to develop efficient implementations than they would probably get if OP acts on their instincts.

This is not a coincidence. If you look at my own public work at e.g. https://github.com/chrchang/plink-ng/tree/master/2.0/ and https://github.com/grailbio/base/tree/master/simd , you can see that I play the role of the "not yet smart enough" engineer, not the manager.