You said speaking to both American and German Manufacturers, but I think most people here are discussing salesmen in retail shops.
Any good manf. will be chock full of engineers, hopefully analog EE's, digital ones, etc. and not an overload of manufacturing engineers (those are the ones who take decent products and make them cheaply). Tho that is not always a bad thing -- look at Oppo, which makes high quality disc players. I think only part of the prices they have is Chinese manf'ing. Some of it must be good circuit design maybe from their Silicon Valley stronghold.
But it will be a rare thing to find an engineer in a retail shop, nor should you expect that. The costs would be too high. OTOH, a retail shop worker should understand the need for A/B testing and for blind tests -- but few do.
Any good manf. will be chock full of engineers, hopefully analog EE's, digital ones, etc. and not an overload of manufacturing engineers (those are the ones who take decent products and make them cheaply). Tho that is not always a bad thing -- look at Oppo, which makes high quality disc players. I think only part of the prices they have is Chinese manf'ing. Some of it must be good circuit design maybe from their Silicon Valley stronghold.
But it will be a rare thing to find an engineer in a retail shop, nor should you expect that. The costs would be too high. OTOH, a retail shop worker should understand the need for A/B testing and for blind tests -- but few do.