If you have money to pay an engineer a salary, then you have the ability to decide what that engineer will work on, and what qualifications he should have upon hiring him. If you know your auto wipers need additional work, why have you hired an engineer to develop a color picker? The only reason you do that is because you believe the color picker is a higher priority than fixing the auto wipers.
It absolutely is a prioritization issue. And this is why I specifically chose the word "rudderless". Where is the management and direction coming from? Where is the focus on these goals? Who is driving the overall development? The answer to all of those things is: nobody and nowhere. If there were competent people directing this, then you would have many of these things fixed already.
Hey Joe. I don't think you understand how engineering teams work. Engineers are assigned to product teams with a specific focus and tract. Moreover, engineers have specialties and experience that go along with that. They are not interchangeable manufacturing parts -- e.g. you're thinking of software as a factory that can shift priorities and all engineers are effectively the same. This is not the case at all.
The team and the engineers focused on the in-car display applications have zero relation to the team that focuses on FSD, Auto Pilot, Embedded engineering, etc.
In all likelihood they are organized like:
FSD Team --> Hardware Engineers, Embedded Engineers, Data Engineers and a Product Manager
Apps Team --> Front End Engineer, Backend Engineer, and a Product Manger
You cannot pivot the front end engineer to the FSD team and
accomplish anything. Nor the backend engineer.
Lastly, Tesla doesn't really have a "budget" to worry about and they likely
capitalize every single engineer which means it is
below EBITDA. So their financial results look good anyway. They are probably trying to hire any one and everyone they can at the tune of probably 150% of the capacity they actually need to deal with turnover given the current demand for engineers.
It is not to say they are perfectly organized, no. But it is likely a simple problem of "priorities".