I have never done any special SEO tricks and yet all my content is fairly high on the results.
SEO in general is quite useless in my opinion. Make the content good enough so that people want to visit the site! Don't trick people to come there.
I'm not doubting your experience, but this is such a common misconception that I must point it out.
If usage of your product is not what puts food on the table, by all means go for the engineering marketing approach. It's genuine.
If you need customers to have a roof on top of your head, though, learn marketing. It's not evil, it is necessary, and strange as it may seem, it is as important to success as product quality.