I spent a few years inside Big Blue. It moves very slowly but (IMHO) has world class people putting out well written, quality stuff.

It has its dark corners like anywhere else, I'm willing to concede it may just have been the teams I worked with that were awesome, it's certainly not cool, I wouldn't want to spend my whole career working for them and (frankly) god help you if you let one of their salesman in the building... But I learned a lot about doing things right. And now I'm a freelancer without the massive organisational overhead so I get to do things fast and right.

I dunno, maybe a large traditional corp isn't the only answer, but some way of enforcing good practice on people for a while, like a boot camp, so that they can take some of it with them to environments where it's not enforced as rigidly.