Disclosure: An ex-employee who loves the organization.

CRUD is a very generic label that could be applied to many interesting apps. I could classify Facebook as CRUD, but that does not mean that it is a seriously exciting system from an engineering perspective. There are a gazillion factors that make large systems interesting and at TW I have had opportunity to work on what I thought were interesting systems (though obviously not at the scale of Facebook)

The single most important thing that I consider special about TW is their Social Impact Program http://www.thoughtworks.com/social-impact.

Crux of the story. Whether an organization is special or not is a multi-dimensional question subjective to individual perceptions.

No they're not. I've worked with them. They are pretty good at turning around typical enterprise tech platforms that are in trouble. I'm not talking about CRUD stuff but heavy integration and workflow stuff with hundreds to thousands of tables that scales to thousands of concurrent users. They know the tech very well and know how to get from A to B cheaply which is incredibly difficult. They know how to organise large teams as well and have a good tech relationship with a lot of vendors which is really important.

Not joking but what we threw at them had a codebase that would scare a lot of people and they sucked it up and spat it out in good shape and they did the same with the team too.

As for Fowler, the analysis and formal descriptions he wrote up for PoEEA are rather good. Read the book at least once. You'll understand why things like hibernate were written and what problems they solve.