> Rolling our own dependency-management tooling took a small team of engineers (including me) more than a year of very hard work, and there were problems.

I am amazed what is done in large organisations sometimes. No one would ever sign off on me doing something like this. How do you convince the number crunchers that its a good thing to build things like this if there is no measurable outcome?

Not trying to be rude or devalue OPs work, but I haven't worked in an organisation that would allow for this in a long while.