> But the problem is that as an engineering discipline, software engineering is just profoundly underwhelming. There are basically no universally-respected design best practices, no governing bodies, no calculations of safety limits, no nothing.

I somewhat disagree: there exist a lot of deep questions in software engineering, and there do exist some (very, very partial) answers.

The problem rather is that most people don't want to listen to and/or do deep literature research about the few answers that we do have, but rather want to aggressively push their private political agenda about how they want software to be built. With some literature research, it is often not too hard to disprove the "foundations" on which this political agenda is built. But this does not make you admired because you showed serious knowledge about software engineering, but rather near to an outlaw.

TLDR: the problem is not software engineering, the problem is organizational politics.

What questions in particular are you thinking of that's purely about the engineering and ultimately not the political agenda?