It makes total sense to me. Having web developers is not the same thing as "a real technical / engineering department." Most of the cruft on newspapers sites is

It makes total sense to me. Having web developers is not the same thing as "a real technical / engineering department." Most of the cruft on newspapers sites is not carefully implemented custom code. It's a library, or vendor-supplied code, or CMS plugin that is just installed, configured, and forgotten about. Without strong engineering leadership, shit just gets piled on top of shit as the feature requests come in. Which also relates to items 3 and 4... without strong technical leadership, a developer team can easily just settle into triage/service mode, where they just try to keep up with satisfying each request that comes in. The result is growing technical debt and an unfocused, confused product.