I have seen firsthand that the way things are built can be changed.

Our development group has undergone such a change. As I see it, 3 things happened to make it successful:

1) There was a change in leadership in the group. The new lead developer that was hired to replace an outgoing one brought new ideas to the development process and got developers excited to try the change.

2) They implemented an Agile / Scrum method. They sold management and marketing groups on the process and started to produce some favorable results. Because they started to produce, other groups stopped micromanaging their efforts, which in turn allowed them to make more progress.

3) Finally, there have been a core group of developers that have been kept together for that entire time.

The results are that in the past two years, the whole process has improved greatly.