> I've worked with some incredibly motivated and talented people and this is not my impression at all.

I worked with some incredibly motivated and talented people too - and saw many of them ground down as basic improvements took literally years to make it through in watered-down form, if they even saw the light of day at all. I was actually amazed by how few people in the financial industry are incompetent in the "couldn't write fizzbuzz" sense, but there seems to be a big-picture insularity where stuff that would be basic and common sense in every other industry (e.g. automated CI) is just not done.