> I suspect that they may be hiring less-disciplined engineers, these days.

I don't know about that; if Apple had lowered their hiring bar, they'd likely have enough engineers to not be constantly starving one project or another of talent because it's being "borrowed" by the Big New (next-to-announce-at-a-keynote) Thing. That still seems to be a problem; I haven't noticed any decrease in the number of Apple projects that "lay fallow" while their engineers are off doing something else.