The point I'm making is that you are doing everything but looking at the question from a perspective other than your own, and that's the sine qua non of competence at office politics -- the correct analysis of the social and political pressures currently affecting any given other person, and how a prospective action on your part might influence them.

To refer briefly back to my example: If our lovable rogue doesn't care whether, by attempting to improve the product, he risks both getting himself fired and damaging the political situation around that change to the point where it has no reasonable prospect of being made in the definite future, then he should go right ahead and do what he wants to do.

If either of those concerns matters to him at all, though, he'll be much better served by instead laying off a ways and making sure he's got a solid grasp of the situation, and only then commencing to consider how to make the change he wants to make in a way that'll favor its survival, or whether there is no such way and he'll be better off just adding it to his "when I find a way" list.