"But the best way to have a future is to be part of a team that values progress over politics, ideas over territory and initiative over decorum." Recently had to quit my job because of exactly this. People will sabotage things simply because they want the useful idea to be theirs.
Building something that works in a short period of time when a team has failed to do that over several quarters demonstrates little more than the fact that your organization has hired people less competent and productive than you. Unless you want to work where you're the least competent person, this isn't necessarily bad. Hiring highly competent people to build software does not scale as well as hiring (many) more le…
This becomes less and less true as the size and complexity of the relevant software projects grows over time. If highly competent developers have anything going for them, it's their skill both in successfully coping with software complexity, and in preventing undue complexity/keeping it under check in the first place. See also The Mythical Man-Month, etc. etc.