> Calling svn part of the problem is also kind of backwards - it has no bearing on the code quality itself

Lets just be Bayesian for a minute. If an organization can't figure out how to get off of svn, which is a dead and dying technology within 15-20 years of it being basically dead in most of tech then probably it's not not going to be nimble in other ways. Probably it's full of people who don't really do any work.

> Some of the internal wiki was migrated directly to Confluence (and lost all formatting and internal links in the process)

Dude this is what I mean. How did someone manage to mess this up? It's not exactly rocket science to script something to suck out of one wiki and shove into another one. But lets say it's hard to do (it's not). Did they just not even bother to look at what they did? They just figured "meh" and declared victory and then three were no consequences, nobody bothered to go back and redo it or fix it? Moving stuff between wiki's is an intern-skill-level task. This is another example that screams that the people at your work don't do their jobs and don't care about their work, and that this is tolerated or more likely not even noticed. Do you work for the government?

> Commit messages are really the only thing you can actually rely on.

I suspect you are exaggerating how reliable your commit messages are, considering.