Honest question - is this a part of your hiring pitch? "Our engineers don't complain about business constraints" is a red flag if I ever heard one.
Make sockets as first priority and then write tcp stack as "unneeded"/postponed is quite frequent from a bussiness standpoint. Not complaining about situations like this is just hurting the bussiness.
The core problem is that too often business needs are dogmatic and management is too entrenched to fix it.
This is the reason why so many large-scale IT/digitalization projects end up colossal clusterfucks: no one on customer side has the spine to say "our processes and workflows were made in an age where people did things by hand, let us modernize them while we're already at it".
> clearly articulate trade offs to stakeholders
may be the constructive cousin of complaining.