Your post was great up until this. I don't like the 'Things were great in the past but look at us now' tone in general (doesn't mean it's not true in some cases), but also that's not what the historical incident shows : the "engineers then" were just as flabbergasted at Feynman's approach as anybody, and didn't trust the results.
Feynman was a physicist, not an engineer. Differentials and integrals were his breakfast and dinner for ~50 years at the time. You and his colleagues at the CM team saw Outsider's Effect in action: where a talented individual, with a mind fresh of dogmas and established approaches, manage to repurpose the tools they practiced and honed in a different domain to engage and destroy a target in another domain from a highly unusual angle. Like startups, it doesn't always work. But when it works, it's fantastic.
As much as I admire him, Feynman was also no stranger to "Proof By Intimidation." So, skepticism about his claims was always warranted if you couldn't follow them yourself.
This is the difference between engineering and academia--abandoning an incorrect claim or assumption may carry a cost. If you are engineering something, someone might might actually hold you to your claims and start allocating money and resources. So, your claims had better be accurate.
This is part of where the famous intransigence of engineers comes from. "Yes" and "No" are difficult answers. The world is full of "Maybe". Having the intuition from experience to pull the trigger even when the answer is "Maybe" is what makes you a high-level engineer.
Mostly interviews with students or grand-students.
However, I think Carver Mead also mentions this about "Collective Electrodynamics". Feynman got a lot of it right, but there were gaps and he simply bulldozed over people who poked at the gaps--sometimes because he believed it obviously true and sometimes because he wanted to dissuade people from working on something he was already working on himself.
It's kind of a bad habit of lots of academics. Nobody has the time to understand the whole stack of things you stand on, so someone (generally junior) poking at something way down the stack is generally going to get brushed off with "That's obviously true". And, generally, that's fine. But, sometimes it's not and in engineering sometimes it has a cost.
A vital part of engineering is communication. For example, I have calculated the resonant frequency of a microprocessor power grid using a Poynting vector formulation. It was very clever and very accurate, but completely indecipherable to most engineers. It was my job to correlate that with something that fellow engineers understood and trusted.
Your post was great up until this. I don't like the 'Things were great in the past but look at us now' tone in general (doesn't mean it's not true in some cases), but also that's not what the historical incident shows : the "engineers then" were just as flabbergasted at Feynman's approach as anybody, and didn't trust the results.
Feynman was a physicist, not an engineer. Differentials and integrals were his breakfast and dinner for ~50 years at the time. You and his colleagues at the CM team saw Outsider's Effect in action: where a talented individual, with a mind fresh of dogmas and established approaches, manage to repurpose the tools they practiced and honed in a different domain to engage and destroy a target in another domain from a highly unusual angle. Like startups, it doesn't always work. But when it works, it's fantastic.