I've seen a lot more engineers self-describe as rational and pragmatic than I've seen act like it. This here website is quite a marvelous zoological gallery in that respect. (Love you folks, you are messy complicated humans the lot of you and I wish I could cogently convey how good it is to embrace that instead of pretending elsewise.)

We do pick tools in good part based on how we feel about them (especially engineers who believe themselves beings of pure rationality, tbh), and I think that's in fact okay; how we feel doesn't come from nowhere, it's informed by decades of experience often acquired the hard way. But it's still a squishy metric that can only be trusted to a point, and being aware of how this sort of decision making occurs, in yourself and in others, is highly valuable IMO.