> I have yet to find the mythical efficiency everyone was talking about.
Comes down to a misrepresentation of history. Germans were never known to be efficient, they were known to be precise with everything, including bureaucracy. This happens to be handy with machinery, but not much else.
...but their machinery (or cars and motorcycles at least) are needlessly complex and unbelievably frustrating to work on.
Really I think that they just landed on some really successful marketing.
> Really I think that they just landed on some really successful marketing.
It depends. For some machinery the complexity is inherent, this makes German machines very good at what they do. But this approach does not tend to scale well, which is part of the reason the German economy tends to be fairly specialized with „hidden champion“ SMEs.
Made in Germany has (had?) a very positive connotation to it, but for historic reasons.
Japanese engineers seem to have figured out the "inherent complexity".