Managers will let you get away with anything if you time your reports correctly. They also don't want to sit in meetings where they are reminded of better outsourcing alternatives and they chose to dogfeed instead.

We've become too comfortable, since actual toil is no longer seen in the company: Manufacturing is overseas, customer support is overseas, logistics is an afterthought with established guarantees. Thus we want the mild weather and smooth meetings. If your engineering team is too smooth, maybe you should already branch out to help other related but "struggling" teams to get your hands dirty and noticed.