Your understanding of engineers' personalities, job descriptions appears limited to the stereotypical tape on the glasses, pocket protector, white shirt, "nerds" from 40 years ago.
The notion that engineers are "just tinkering around a lab bench coming up with crap that people either don't need, or can't understand" is ridiculous. Engineering is almost always market driven. It is rare that engineers are given an open-ended "just come up with something" job description.
Similarly, by the time a high tech product gets to the public the hard core tech details have been sanitized and distilled down to the most basic monosyllabic instructions (with pictures for the illiterate). You do not need to know how a DVD player works to watch a DVD, in fact you may not have even read the instructions when you opened the box.
How many products didn't make it because they weren't adequately explained to the public? Sure CD's and DVD's are obvious, but there were a lot of picture disk technologies that didn't cut it. And does anybody remember four-channel stereo from many years ago? My experience with things tells me that there are clueless salespeople (just like in the Dilbert cartoon) that don't care if they're selling microchips, or potato chips. I wish that the folks who really understood what things are, and how they work, would spend some time figuring out how to make these things work for their customers, or they will just sit on shelves.
Engineers don't have too bad of a public image, but whining because they can't make $100K a year, to people making $30K a year who they expect to buy the products they design is not going to help that image.