First, no one gives a crap about security until something like this happens to them. The incentives are not in place to require it. Time and resources spent on security are time and resources not spent on beating the competitor. The best outcome you can hope for if you _do_ spend on security is that your competitor will have some apocalyptic breach similar to this one, and that doesn't happen most of the time, at least not in a way that results in any accountability or visibility.
It's important to understand that because it's the reason why your bosses will never care unless/until they have an experience like this, or until they expect someone important to be looking for an opening (audits, due diligence, etc).
Second, there are indeed some clowns and cronies hired at these sort of places, but a lot of the people are decently skilled. I'm speaking generally about the workforce at these larger enterprisey companies, as I don't know anyone at Equifax afaik.
Technical competence is less of an issue than intra-managerial political games like "shift the blame" and "silo defense", at least some of the time. Part of "intra-managerial games" is having the least-skilled people in the most authoritative positions, leaving decision authority with those least equipped to evaluate a situation and determine a responsible response.
I am sure that there is someone at Equifax who saw the news on this vulnerability and registered it as being something they needed to patch. I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that this person didn't say anything because they learned long ago that there's nothing to be gained by actually trying to get the patch done in any non-routine manner.
I also wouldn't be surprised to learn they did try to raise the alarm and were mocked and/or shut down, both by other technical groups trying to avoid the appearance of an issue with "their" section of the system, and/or by management, who are likely to interpret such attempts as alarmism, if not plain political malfeasance.
Hate to say it but we're on the brink of a formalized licensing program for security, servers, etc. I am honestly surprised that the mainstream outlets and politicians have not been touting this yet, with all the high-profile and extremely costly data security breaches that have been occurring over the last few years, but I really expect it to come soon. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see Equifax become the Enron-like scapegoat for such legislation.