The Roman empire – the first "Sceptic state"

I’ve been doing “some” research into the Romans and the more I read, the more it seems to me that the Roman Empire, was built and largely run by what we would now call “sceptics” or “Engineers”. Take for example, the simplest facet of the Roman world: their straight roads (left :). Compare that to today’s architecture…

Roman road at Bainbridge. It is elegantly simple and functional and has lasted two thousand years with very little need for maintenance.

The Scottish parliament is an eyesore, a dog’s dinner come up of a mess – the windows leaked and it costs a fortune to maintain (both building and people).

The simple fact is that today’s society, run by idiot politicians with arts degrees and no common sense, seems to value rubbish that doesn’t work as typified by the Scottish parliament, and it despises the simple beauty and technically superb Roman roads (which by the way they have lasted are in many cases better than roads we put down today).
Indeed, if the Romans had a problem, it was that their army and economy was so successful that they just could stop winning wars. The only thing that really stopped them were Scottish midges and German humour aka cold/cultural differences (and it didn’t help that the Italians were small, the Germans were large, and the Romans had a complex about being small).
Why I think this is so important, is because it is far easier to see bias in the way people view different civilisations than how we view our own. And the more I look at the Roman period, the more I am finding that the anti-engineering culture of modern academia is having a profound effect on their understanding of this period so that it is distorting the perception of academics when they view the engineering culture of the Romans.
For example, I was reading about the make up of the Roman army. The author said that of the 10 cohorts in the first was the most prestigious … but this was hardly credible because it was larger as it also contained all the “technicians” as he referred to them or “professional engineers” as more enlightened people might call them.
The author had correctly noted that the first cohort was the most prestigious. That it was different from the rest and considerably larger. That it contained engineers. But because of the anti-engineering culture within Universities which they seems to colour their perception of both issues like climate and history, he couldn’t square “most prestigious” with “contains the engineers”.
To me it was obvious: the Roman army was superb at engineering. It built roads across vast marshes, bridges across the Rhine in just a few days. It amazed the world with its engineering excellence. Yet an academic expert on the Romans was incapable of seeing that the most important people within the Roman army were the engineers – and this is why they were in the first Cohort and that was why the first cohort was so important.