Oh listen I recognise your pain. I've known a few good folk who headed off to Redmond back in the early to mid 2000's only to return shortly thereafter completely disillusioned. I think Guthrie was well aware of this problem and began to slowly turn things around bit by bit.

Just to tack on a convenient anecdote...apparently the original ASP.NET MVC code was written by Guthrie....on a flight, this is the earliest evidence I can find of this:

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottGuMVCPresentationAndScot...

I also forgot to include Phil Haack who back then was also part of that gang that began steering the DevDiv ship to brighter shores.