You're right, piping water from point A to B is perhaps one of humanity's most challenging problems.
What's really sad is that so many people are brainless enough to believe that this is not possible to solve, and easily so, once incentives drive it forward.
Your comment does remind me of many of the 0.1-0.5x engineers I've worked with though. We need hundreds of people to maintain a mobile client, it's not possible to do it with a handful!
I'm sure those "0.1x" engineers found you a treat to work with. One of the more impressive combinations of abject ignorance and misplaced confidence I've seen in a long time. Believe it or not, but there are indeed people who've designed large volume water piping systems on Hackernews..
Just the lack of understanding of like 15 different aspects of the problem with that idea and the confidence to defend regardless is kind of amazing.