It sounds like the developer spent a lot of time implementing something that nobody wanted. Drawing the sky accurately may be cool, but it wasn't required in this case. It's also not innovation. It's been done before.

This is like if you were renovating your house and the drywall guy spends a huge amount of time building up round corners, but you just wanted regular square corners. Then on some drywall forum they're bitching about how "all clients are stupid" or something.

This is a wildly unprofessional attitude. Programmers are craft(wo)men. They employ their craft toward creating things people pay them to create.

We aren't painting sistine chapels, we are running the plumbing in the sistine chapels basement. The job doesn't exist to give you emotional fulfillment. A mason doesn't insist that a client who needs a warehouse must pay him to spend a week detailing corbelled brick cornices. He makes a CMU wall, in the cheapest and most efficient way that still gets the job done.

It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our own ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a professional immaturity of the highest order. That was one of the hardest lessons I learned as a fresh engineer and I see so often others that are just learning it. Sometimes people never learn it.

I've been in the developer's shoes. I've also been in the manager's shoes.

It's not that simple. There's possibly better ways to deal with it, but for safety-critical stuff (like a navigation display in a vehicle), simple is much, much better. In many cases, there's actually laws and liability stuff involved.

I once spent six months, developing an "un-asked-for" WiFi control app for a digital camera, and had it nuked. It worked much better than the shipping app (which was enjoying a richly-deserved one-star rating in the app store).

The considerations had a lot to do with the corporate Process (note the capital "P"), which I sidelined. I thought I could do better, but the people with the hands on the brake, thought different. I didn't kiss the right rings. That's a very real consideration in any corporation.

As a manager, however, I did go to bat for employees that displayed initiative. In some cases, I was successful. In some cases, not so much.

A foundational, core theme about making commercial software, that repeats over and over and I slowly got accustomed to is: companies really don't want these kinds of micro-innovations. 90% of companies are just looking at their competitors, making a checklist out of those products, and asking engineers to check the boxes and go home. They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and polish, about lint warnings, about "oh, that's a nice touch," or even quality beyond "will the customer return the product?" They just want people to poop out software as fast as possible so everyone can get bonuses and drive around on their jetskis on Saturday.

If you're the kind of developer who likes to "sand and finish the back side of the cabinet," either you need to find a very rare, special company, or do it at home as a hobby.