Bsrhrki

Another famous aphorism is the following

you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

said to mean that it is very difficult to teach someone new skills or to change someone's habits or character (Cambridge Dictionary)

Usually said of people who set in their ways and are well past their twenties or thirties...

Not meant as a compliment, but neither is the Russian aphorism I suspect, it's a very well-known saying that claims people cannot change who they are.

a leopard can't/doesn't change its spots

something you say that means a person's character, especially if it is bad, will not change, even if they pretend that it will (Cambridge Dictionary)

The Phrase Finder says of its origins

'A leopard cannot change its spots' is found in the Bible, Jeremiah 13:23 (King James Version):

"Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil."

There is an idiom for this, and it applies without having to reference any animals or professions, or anything at all.

Old habits die hard

Normally this is used to talk about literal habits - such as smoking, or biting one's nails, but it can also be used to refer to old ways of doing things that aren't necessarily the best - which matches nicely with what you're trying to say in your blog post.

All roads lead to Rome.

This idiom is often taken to mean that "all the methods of doing something will achieve the same result in the end." Cambridge Online Dictionary.

I think many of the answers here are very good. However, I suspect that there's an element of the Russian quote that isn't quite being addressed. That is, in the "Every Russian invents the Kalashnikov" quote, I believe the Kalashnikov is supposed to be a high standard, and the idea is that if you ask anyone brilliant (i.e., a Russian) to invent a great gun, they will all come up with the same great gun: the Kalashnikov, since it's the greatest gun. So it's somewhat futile to have brilliant people to improve on perfection. I may be over emphasizing the Russian pride here, but my point is to contrast this with something like "You can't teach an old dog new tricks", which implies a low standard.

As such, I think something closer to Great minds think alike captures that part of the quote, although that's a little more general of a phrase. But in the context of

We asked two engineers to independently build a better mouse trap and they came up with the same design. Great minds think alike, I guess.

I think this would be closest to the Kalashnikov quote.

It's too dated for general use, but one very similar idea is using the name Birmingham screwdriver for a hammer, the idea being that old simple brute force will get the job done well enough, regardless of what refinements people were expecting you to add.

Apparently French has the idea of déformation professionnelle: the tendency of experts to only see problems and solutions through the viewpoint of their own experience and professional biases. That's fairly close, and French expressions nearly always seem cultured in English.

You could try the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

It's a bit more focussed on a family level, as opposed to national identity.

Roughly described, it says that children will not be very different from their parents. Particularly if the speaker thinks the parents are untrustworthy, they won't trust their children.

disclaimer: I don't personally consider this proverb to be true.

Wherever you go, there you are.

Because of the way the sentence is structured, at first it seems like it's a truism "wherever you go, there you are." While the hidden meaning is that "wherever you go, there you are."

It means that if you try to move somewhere to get away from a set of problems which you have created, you end up taking yourself with you. And you recreate the problems in the new place, to which you move, because you take the source of the problems with you.

Although I see your point and perfectly understand it, there is another small detail that may change the outcome. You see, inventing Kalashnikov wasn't something like BMW or other product engineered with perfection and simplicity. This was a response to very hard times for entire nation, along with other great solutions for those times such as T-34, Katjusha rocket weaponry, Dragunov sniper riffle etc.
In some distant reality the meaning of "Whatever a Russian does, they end up making the Kalashnikov gun" may take a shape of "Desperate time call for a desperate measure".

"Whatever a Russian does, they end up making the Kalashnikov gun”

 Are there any similar proverbs in English?

One needs to understand the design and history of the gun.

The Kalashnikov was simple, cheap, not made to tight tolerances and popular because it worked well and was widely distributed. Some successors were no improvement and it was not replaced by its much better successors because they suffered from limited funding and distribution, never gaining the popularity worthy of their better design.

1. Comfortable as an old shoe. - Not particularly close. You are at ease / familiar with it, but it's seen better days.




2. Adequate for our needs. - This is much closer, it implies that there are problems that are overlooked or unspoken; often due to greater cost or perceived complexity of something newer and better.




3. Reinventing the square wheel. - Arguably the closest idiom. It means unnecessarily engineering artifacts that provide functionality already provided by existing standard artifacts (reinventing the wheel) and ending up with a worse result than the standard (a square wheel).




4. Best practices. - Quite similar, if taken to mean copying something similar that works because it will be accepted and not because it's the best solution.

See Wikipedia's webpage for the AK-47, officially known as the Avtomat Kalashnikova:

"Design: The AK-47 was designed to be a simple, reliable fully automatic rifle that could be manufactured quickly and cheaply, using mass production methods that were state of the art in the Soviet Union during the late 1940s. The AK-47 uses a long stroke gas system that is generally associated with great reliability in adverse conditions. The large gas piston, generous clearances between moving parts, and tapered cartridge case design allow the gun to endure large amounts of foreign matter and fouling without failing to cycle.

See also: Strategy Page's article: "Weapons: A Better AK-47 But So What?" and "Weapons: Russia Cannot Afford A Better AK".

The so-called upgrade and improvements have been one step forward and one step back, which is an improvement over one step forward and two steps back, an effort that makes no sense.

A tiger can't change his stripes

I may be misapprehending the situation, but I did check out the link to the original blog and read through Google's best effort at a translation.

This phrase, to me, gives a good approximation of the concept - that these game dev studios were all set in their ways, and while that isn't necessarily a bad thing - it just means that, 'they are what they are' - to be tautological.