That's some comfort then. I never saw any indication of it; across multiple projects I never saw any drive to refactor, or any of the signs I associate with dev

That's some comfort then. I never saw any indication of it; across multiple projects I never saw any drive to refactor, or any of the signs I associate with developers taking pride in one's work (documentation above what is asked for, root cause analysis even when a surface issue has been taken care of, or really, any addressing of non-functional requirements that were obvious, but which had not been demanded in the contract). Perhaps because they were mostly long running projects that had already been bidden on, and just having the domain knowledge meant that they'd continue to have the advantage on any future bids to extend it. Also, while I've seen bid wins/losses talked about from the perspective of the quality of the solution, I've not seen them talked about having been won/loss due to past performance. I hope you're right that that's a consideration, but the lack of controls around quality, and the obvious apathy I saw, lends me to think that if that's a consideration, it's not one the government knows how to actually judge.