Even if the people have good attitude and willing to learn. How fast can you progress him/her with such a top heavy management? Most probably also about the same time as his/her peers. Or even slower than scholars. What's the point then?

Btw attitude and willingness to learn won't get your far in ST. You need your boss to like you and big boss to give you opportunities. I've seen too many good engineers not getting their promotion and credits they deserve whereas engineers doing non technical stuffs like events planning, minutes taking during management meeting, airshows and other CCAs getting promoted much faster. These are opportunities not given to all engineers, only engineers with special privilege will be involved. Often not engineering related. Resulting in those promoted engineers lacking in engineering knowledge / experiences.

What's the message the company is driving across? Technical skills not important, bootlick, event planning and other adhoc activities are more important.