Oh dear, that sounds quite painful!
I like fire Fighting jobs, you always see some new insanity.
I actually get what you mean. There's something kinda rewarding about reducing chaos in a tangled system like that. At a certain point (as long as you're careful) you kind of can't go wrong, every little improvement incrementally makes the world a little bit better and the application a bit easier and more predictable to work with.
But this crowd believed it obviously. The chief perpetrators already left when I got there, so I could not ask directly. Zero tests, zero documentation and a coding style like somebody tried to write pure C in c#.