This sounds pretty familiar to me as well. I have the same type of background as you (you don't want me banging out 20k LoC/day either) and when I interviewed with this team I got nowhere fast. I didn't get the run-around like you, but I did get shot down pretty quickly because I didn't know some fancy algorithm straight off the top of my head.

I'm seriously heavy into building systems in AWS, architecting solutions, and was really excited about changing the government for the better. I never even got a chance. :(