They were by-and-large the systems engineers. Most had math or physics degrees (BS->PhD), and the rest had various engineering degrees. The bigger problem in this case, though, is the isolation of this project from everything else. Its hard for me to explain properly without the details I can't provide, but in short this group had a really hard problem to solve, and did so. Some people built their entire careers on this, and they developed this destructive attitude that is part Not Invented Here and part superiority complex. The result was that whatever a handful of the senior engineers though was the best approach was the direction "development"[1] went, no matter the evidence to the contrary.

I don't think this is indicative of the discipline as a whole. The discipline is necessary in many market segments. Even software companies have systems engineers; they just call them software architects. I'm not sure what could be done about a situation like I described above, though.

If you want to discuss this more offline, you can get my contact info from my profile.

[1] "Development" in this case was taking obsolete algorithm code, hacking in new functionality as quickly as possible, and forcing it to work with minimal perceived effort in the top-level system where all the software was being written from scratch.