My last job had similar -- our internal tools were a buggy mess, to the point where customer support spent upwards of 75% of their time fighting the software instead of supporting customers - but the CEO decided that the dev team would not fix any bugs that aren't DIRECTLY affecting end-users, nor would the dev team "waste time" reviewing patches from frustrated tech-literate support staff fixing internal bugs for themselves.

However, the support staff still had root logins to all our servers, so they followed the letter of the law by not having their patches go through the code review / source control / gradual rollout process...