I'm a former intern from AWS (6 month non-tech internship). Now I work in a completely different part of the company full time.

My experience is exactly like what 'onaplane' wrote. Internship was great & very rewarding from a career/working on cool stuff perspective. What I saw was that people who worked long did it because they wanted to (I work(ed) long sometimes because I wanted to!). 40-50 was the norm for AWS & it's roughly the same on the retail side. Are there bad teams at Amazon? Absolutely. Are there awesome ones? Yep!

"A lot of what you say is right out of the amazon weltanshaung-- its cult has seeped in to some extent."

You're doing the exact same thing in reverse.