Part of this stems from government accountability issues. If you fix that bug, and you don't go through the process, no you didn't. At any time the government

Part of this stems from government accountability issues. If you fix that bug, and you don't go through the process, no you didn't. At any time the government can ask for a contract performance review, and doing things the easy way means lots of things that should be tracked don't get tracked... which means they never make it into the contract performance review. They mean well, and I understand how hard it can be for government agents to hold massive contractors accountable, but the purpose of a system is what it does... so we wind up with entrenched bureaucracy, and the players who don't subscribe to these approaches wind up getting outcompeted because their on-paper performance doesn't measure up. Even if they're in fact a million times easier to work with and do a great job.