> Apply around to a lot of places, and look for somewhere that values the skills you have but also will allow you to develop into the longer-term role you want to hold.

Applying for jobs is what I've been doing. Why would you assume I wasn't? Perhaps because I forgot to mention that in my original post since everyone seems to assume that.

Anyways, in general because bug fixing is not considered desirable work, it's hard to find people who want to do it. I'm willing to do it again at this point, despite having sunk considerable costs into learning about data science/engineering. So, it's hard to find people.

Guess what? They won't let people leave sustaining engineering because it's hard to find replacements. So, no sustaining engineering manager is going to seriously entertain talking about tossing out an sustaining engineer. It's either fix bugs or quit.

In fact, that was the situation my boss did to me last time. There's no feature or tool development but he sort of lied about moving up and around the company when I was brought on.

So I quit and tried to take initiative and now it's not working out like I had tried to.