I think if we're considering the morale of the engineers, then they would prefer to work in a wild environment rather than an overly rigid one. In a sense, it'

I think if we're considering the morale of the engineers, then they would prefer to work in a wild environment rather than an overly rigid one. In a sense, it's fun to write bad code, commit it without consequences, and just watch a report of your LOC go up (the key metric for engineers in this strawman company). I think from the business perspective, they would rather have slow to no changes rather than breaking changes. Presumably there is already a product that makes money, and would continue to do so if kept in a maintenance mode. Layer on poorly applied practices, and you've effectively turned it into that.