why not having engineering backgrounds? there were herbert hoover and jimmy carter as for your request. im not a big fan of jimmy carter from several reasons, dont want to specify what he has done.
in special circumstance like korea, a president and his/her administration having engineering backgrounds would be more competitive imho. the country initially needs to take a bunch of rats out of vessel by landing a good system in order to fix its own radical problem – operation research with engineering backgrounds would be very powerful to leach them out and boost overall productivity. koreans dont need a bunch of law makers, who only takes care of their family and think irrationally based on old-fashioned kantianism.
i believe that compromise isnt the primary skill to evaluate leadership. with no discipline comitted to public, any negotiation only works for his/her own business purpose as we have probably seen many cases in korea. also, a bit out of point, there will be a strong need to break china apart imo – here china includes n.korea as well. it could be very easy to break its alignment. british historically did this with opium, and others can easily do over today. for example, look how easy the owner of yahoo takes the poison pill from google, and how fast indians were kicked out by new invaders in america – the indians sold manhattan island at a few bucks.
why not having engineering backgrounds? we never say never.
Hemingway said: “The world kills the good, the beautiful, the gentle and the brave.”