I too admire the Germans, and worked for various German companies for 27 years. I did finally get to be fluent in German..or so my friends told me.
Like many nationalities there are good at some things but not in others. Flexabilty is not a strong point, but systematic rigor is. I attribute this to their language, which is complicated but has few exceptions. They think this way from infancy.
So they excel at road building and engineering. They love quality above quantity.
In WWII the Tiger tank was much better that the Sherman but we built dozens more per Tiger. In wars quantity is better.
In terms of business though you’ll find few German companies expanding in the Fatherland. They go to other parts of the world if they can. BMW in South Carolina and Mercedes in Alabama are two examples. Maybe that’s economic imperialism of a kind, but we all benefit.
If we could just get them to come over and fix our lousy roads here in the northeast I would be happy.
I think it was Stalin who said "Quantity has a quality all its own."
Reading one of Stephen Ambrose's books on WWII, when veterans were asked which Europeans they admired the most, he was surprised that most of them said the Germans.
One veteran said that they would fight their way through a town and by time they reached the other side, the Germans were out in the street cleaning up, while in other countries the people were either complaining about the damage or were stealing anything they could from the Americans.