Maybe you're right and class 2 helps the company care more about quality and actually paying their developers (but if they don't, why do the devs work for them?

Maybe you're right and class 2 helps the company care more about quality and actually paying their developers (but if they don't, why do the devs work for them?), but I think I work in a class 2 project, and it's the worst project I've ever been in. The management is completely incompetent (no clue how a sw project works), so even though they blow millions every year, the project setup, architecture, separation of teams, is all abysmal. The different teams cause everybody to no longer give a damn, because if something is broken, you are guaranteed to never be able to fix it - you'd need to call in lots of meetings first. So we all build up little fortresses that call the other module's services. I'd differentiate projects as: those where people in charge care about the underlying build quality (call it technical debt, but that's not nearly all of it), and those where people in charge don't give a damn for anything except their current deadline/objectives (doesn't matter if anything of value makes it into the current build).