This quote from your post captures the many ways the system gets jepordized:

It is how good engineers in corporations end up with incompetent middle managers – because the good engineers spend their time innovating, while the bad ones spend their time becoming managers. The system often rewards people with the skills that are required to be a good hierarchy climber, often opposite to competence at a clear job.

The system was never tailored for ""working class people or for poor people"" alone. No one tells you the rules of the bureaucratic game ""(what you call office politics I call the bureaucratic game. Rich people can cheat code their way in by buying lawyers to create the laws and codes, by buying politicians to write the laws, and by buying the police to enforce them. Poor people have to scratch their heads and navigate through the system blindly. And the lie is brought to them that if they work based on merit then they will go far. But as your statement said, the real people who break away from the system and try to innovate are ignored and often times scolded; all while people who play the game are praised.

Professor Grabber captures your idea eloquently in his book ""Utopia of Rules"" and in this YouTube video, Culture is not your Friend.

Like I said in a previous post: The fight of the century is not against the bourgeois and the proletariat. It is against the managerial class: the laziest, gluttonous, parasitical class. As my Wobbly brothers and sisters would say, "The employing class and the employers have nothing in common."