His, erm, professional design methodology shall we say, has not evolved over the years.
Stress might be a contributing factor.
When these LED fixture topics first started to appear, I thought: great, we have an honest engineer who designs with the help of this forum, we'll get a lots of great info from all the replies!
We indeed have got some great technical posts (thank you Tim for being possibly the biggest contributor), but strangely, it doesn't seem to help the original poster go forward in their designs (or does so extremely slowly). (However, it has definitely helped others.)
Actually I was cynical of other people being so cynical about their methodologies in the start. I mean, something in their methodology sounded familiar of how I work, and I find I've been succesful and have learned a lot - despite, and sometimes even thanks to low budgets and "unprofessional" settings (and making some treez-like mistakes that would have been avoidable with money and organization)!
It's hard to understand why they are so stuck. treez seems to work hard, so we should start seeing some good results. This is why I'm suggesting stress: it narrows your mind, and you start focusing on just survival using the "nearest" methods available, even if they are unbeneficial in the long run (and disastrous to scientific thinking). Such methods include blaming UFOs etc.
If he's the only actual engineer in the company, it tends to deepen the stressful situation, since you have no "peers" to vent your engineering stress (and actually think about
engineering solutions). Instead, you have the management, and way too often, you need those sick "professional" social strategies with the management, including blame shifting. Too often, the management simply cannot accept this idea: "these things just fail sometimes due to human error, now we have to find the root cause, learn, and then we can avoid this mistake in the future!". Instead, the management corners you, forcing you to unconsciously defend the original mistake, which prevents you from learning. It takes a lot of self control to ignore confusion caused by the management and just go on the open-minded engineering/scientific way.