When I took over the place in Ohio - the owner of the place was a Doctor. He was really the only one on the executive staff that bought into my vision and supported it. Everyone else saw me as a trouble maker. After 6 years, he was able to sell the company to a bay area investor and get out. I like to think the changes I implemented in the DC were a big part of what enabled that.
But anyhow, when I was describing what a mess everything was at the start, he kept using the phrase, "organic growth," to describe it. They started out in the CEO's living room. They moved to a little office. The IT guy was really a SQL-DBA/Dev who had no actual enterprise systems engineering experience. They grew, hired some kids out of college with A+ and CCNE certs and AAs in InfoSys. They grew some more, moved, and had to make things work - they didn't have time to start over and fix things - they became legacy issues with kludged fixes. There was never any change control, any documentation it was all "tribal knowledge," which is another favorite phrase of mine in IT. A lot of companies have spent years, decades, with "organic growth," passing on "oral documentation," and "tribal knowledge," before they realize the mess their forest is in and by then, doing some pruning and getting the jungle turned back into a garden is an overwhelming job.
But it isn't unusual. It is actually probably the rule, not the exception.
That said - almost everything I encounter that seems broken in Webcit turns out to be operator error. It ran for I think two years, basically unattended, on a RPi running Raspbian, a weird sub-distro - with no problems - and probably would have kept going if I had just left it alone. There are some things that are *confusing* about it - and it seems to attract people with way less of a skillset than necessary to run it competently - and there isn't a good bridge between the people *making* it and the people like that who want to implement it. But of the server type applications I've ran casually - without an enterprise infrastructure of support helping me - Citadel has been one of the best.
