my background isn't nearly as diverse as yours.

I'm not even an engineer, which makes this point all the more hilarious. I used to design paintball gun bodies. We did all kinds of custom designs involving very tight tolerances for air-tight chambers, valves and electronically controlled pressure regulators. I did this as a hobby back in highschool and early days of college. I can't tell you the number of times I scaled a whole part down to size considering that several of the components were the same shape, just different dimensions depending on the model gun they were going in. I also, within solidworks (which is what I preferred to use, rather than R14 or ProE) could setup dependent dimension variables that would, on-the-fly, re-calculate itself once I specified the relationship. And this is all on software that is at least 3 or 4 years old, and elementary by CAD standards. When it came time to send our drawings off to the shop, there were no complaints, no design flaws that couldn't be solved simply by loading up the drawing and changing something within 5 minutes. In fact, the biggest design flaw I can remember was after all the parts had been fabbed, the shop tried to put the valve assembly together, and I had accidentally put the valve striker pin in the valve body in reverse on the drawing, which physically can't happen. We thought we had 1000 defective units until I studyied the drawing for 20 minutes, slapped myself on the forehead and never forgave myself afterwards.

Thats about the extent of my "engineering." I've never really cared for engineers, considering I always had to fix their flub-ups on campus (I was the IT manager for the Industrial Engineering Dept) and received little to no personal gratitude from the constituency.

Chip on the shoulder? Probably.