Yeah except sometimes good engineering teams sit behind ugly HR practices, and hiring processes unfortunately expose you to HR far more than the actual job does.
The world is full of people doing good and interesting stuff without having all kinds of lame bureaucracy. I'm more than willing to bear the risk of missing out on something interesting by passing on that kind of company.
I don't think level of HR bureaucracy is very well correlated with anything relating to job satisfaction, and it is easy to over-index on during the hiring process. I don't think your willingness to bear the risk of false negatives is unreasonable at all, but it's worth being aware that you're judging one department based on interactions with a completely different one.
If a company has ugly HR practices, you can be sure you will not be the only good person who is balking at the company.
If you HR put you off, you're not the only one. Externally they will find it more difficult to hire, and internally the real talent will start to notice.
Therefore, you don't need to worry about it. There are other places you can work with good people.
