However, the University of Colorado Boulder environment was much larger in some ways than any I worked in and met very different needs.
They had to cope with many students printing jobs, resetting passwords, filling up disk quotas, email queues and more - with an admin group staffed mainly by undergrads, I believe.
csops at CU did all the sysadmin for a time of the Unix machines. It was mostly random undergrads that could be trusted to do these tasks (many would later go on to be well known in open source and other places like Todd Miller), with the occasional more senior person overseeing them. This was not a group that had an excess of resources. The user community was also not very forgiving.
The preference for doing things right vs hacks came from many painful instances where the hacks wound up costing extra time. It was also an ideal, not an absolute. Evi and the csops folks were very pragmatic, and often would do a hack to get things going or keep them going while doing things right to keep what we'd call today 'technical debt' sane.
Evi was a hoot! I still miss seeing her from time to time... I'm still half expecting her to show up after being lost at sea for a decade now :(.
Warner