I'll try to put some more light and perspective into how my previous work place 'ticked' and how I intended to outline my passage to OpenBSD in the article.
My previous workplace was a large corporation. I were literally on the clock accounting for every 0.25h of work I did. You were not allowed to touch a single line of code unless you had billed hours against that task (contract with a client, bug report from a client). This literally meant that doing comprehensive code reviews or reworking a particularly nasty part of the code was not possible. There was a 'process' for doing code reviews but it was so bureaucratic that going through the paper work you had to submit after one took 0.5h-2h but the time you had for a code review was counted as a percentage of the time it took someone to produce or alter the code. So if you reviewed a change that took 1h - you had 10 minutes to do the code review and all the alloted paperwork.
I don't want to speak about the quality of the code base in detail due to obvious reasons but I can assure you that people working on it are really experienced and know what they are doing. Most of the problems and the humongous technical debt is years of corporate culture. Did I mention that the banking system I worked on was born around 15 years ago?
During my 7 years at that job. I had the chance to refactor code once. In my first 3 months of working there since I was not yet on the 'clock'. When I was at my leaving period I was given a free hand and was took off the clock again. This allowed me to really look at the code, analyze potential problems and actually react on them. People that are still working on it don't have that privilege on a daily basis.
The stab at Linux was actually accidental :) I use Linux personally since late 90s. What I mostly pointed out was some of my bad hardware choices in the passage and how OpenBSD drives me more into actually diving into the code contrasted to all the years I solely used Linux.
You are correct that my 'evolution' towards tighter, smaller and correct implementations drew me towards OpenBSD. I think I had that feeling for a long time but hopefully you understand that it's not always in the hands of the programmer himself to call the shots and do things right. What I really loved though was auditing and removing a ton of cruft in one code base while OpenBSD did the same with LibreSSL :)
Hope this answers your question.