This reminds me, in a sad way, of a friend of mine who stayed on when a startup we worked at was acquired by a huge corporation. He has an amazing mind for technical detail, and at the startup, he planned and executed some hugely ambitious technical initiatives. But management at MegaCorp treat him as an obstructionist. They want to announce an initiative, launch it, declare it done, make up a big dollar figure for the "savings," and gather a promotion. They don't need the initiative to make sense or work in a technical sense. But he understands the immensely complicated legacy context, all the work required to accomplish anything, and all the things that will break if they leave out parts of the work, and he won't keep his mouth shut. He would love the challenge of running a big ambitious project, but the only way to get anything big approved is to drastically underestimate the effort, so he's stuck rearranging deck chairs until they inevitably eliminate the product and lay him off.