While I can only peripherally relate to the specifics of your story, I think it beautifully illustrates how interesting and mind expanding it is to spend time in different cultural contexts, and that different cultures can very much co-exist in the same countries or even in the same people.
Everyone should do it more, it really helps put the uncompromising convictions of people around you into perspective and see them as what they often are: a lack of understanding for the breadth of human experience.
Yeah I suppose this is the stuff which you only start to understand after you've been somewhere more than a few years. It also makes you appreciate certain things about where you're from which you didn't even notice and used to take for granted. The European class system combined with a deep cynicism towards tech was a huge surprise to me... Especially for Germany which I thought would be an engineer's paradise.
Australia is extremely egalitarian. I think even more so than the US. In both Australia and the US, you can usually talk to the CEO of the startup directly; they actually like to talk to their staff directly. But in the US, the power differential is usually much bigger, I am more cautious about what I say.
In Germany, there seems to be a more rigid hierarchy and the founders tend to avoid talking to employees directly; they tend to communicate mostly through middle-managers, even in relatively small startups.