Engineering vs product approaches come at problems from different angles.

Engineering is hard; it tends to start from the bottom and accrete hard, well-defined layers upwards.

Product is soft; it tends to start from the top, from an approximate whole, to find resonance, and then harden and flesh out the parts that are working.

The danger of the engineering mindset is that you run out of runway before building anything resonant enough to be viable.

The danger of the product/design approach is that you design something that cannot be built for real.

A sketch of a castle in the sky.

So to avoid that you go with only off-the-shelf tech that will definitely work, and to get something different you go for a novel combination.

If you're trying to innovate on possibility and on resonance at the same time, it's hard!