The assumption that you keep making which is wrong is that pressure in the engine pushes against the outside pressure (atmosphere) to produce thrust, it doesn't.
No its you who make the wrong assumptions. You keep on talking about external gas to the engines like if its a one body within the rocket. Those are not. Even when gases are interior to the engine structure they are still external bodies per se. Gases around you may move very fast they dont affect you unless you compress them against you. Then and only then you might talk about gases affecting another bodies by a compression.
And yes it might seem they are part of rocket becuase they are inside the engine, but they are not a part of the rocket neither any objects with different density is not a part of another body unless you compress them against that body.
The engineers study physics as part of their education process. Engineers generally specialise in particular fields, so you would have many engineers working together each contributing in their own areas.
Engineers are not scientists. To be an engineer all you have to have is a master degree. To be a scientist you need phd. Someone else gives them assumptions and they build stuff based on that assumptions. Difference between a rockets works in vaccum and there is no vacuum in space is completly and utterly irrelevant for them.
I dont want to assume that they dont understand that you cant lift yourself by the belt. Maybe 4 years in college to be an engineer is to little time to understand that you cant but.... What can I say. Im not physicist maybe they figured out the way how to lift yourself up.
If something works inside a physical body it does not mean that it can move the body in any direction without the external force. If you create forces (newtons) inside the physical body the forces even themselfs (as in the law of thermodynamics) out in every direction if not acted upon by external forces. That is like elementary school physics.
Internal combustion engines have burns as slow as 3 one-thousandths of a second. Controlled detonations in rocket engines can reach an excess of 1 fifty thousandth of a second.
So? Does that makes theory of relativity valid at that kind of speeds? No. Its still a normal physics. Its just makes pressure higher IF A PRESSURE IS BUILT. IF is very important here.
Higher molecules speed makes it possible to use slower moving molecules as if they are different density objects to create a pressure but you need both of them.
So, what do freshly exploding gasses in a rocket engine push against since there are no pistons? Two things. The rocket engine, and the previously exploded gasses that haven't made it out of the engine yet.
Thats a BS. Gas is a gas. Freshly exploded gas with unfreshly exploded gas what does that even mean? Either something has same or different density or speed of particles or is soon to be the same fluid. How do you want to divide the gas? By what measures?